We have stalactites in our walls!
Rather strangely, I’ve we’ve discovered stalactites in our walls.
Whilst the photograph is not that clear, that downward dribble to the right of the centre of the picture is a lime stalactite that has formed within the south facing wall of the barn. Whilst the wall is not very damp at the surface, internally it is quite wet and obviously sometimes runs with water. Whilst lime is supposed to breathe, this amount of moisture would take colossal lungs to exhale! That aspect of the building has been recently (over the last 10 years) repointed with what I thought was lime mortar so this comes as something of a blow and an unexpected piece of work. On close inspection the pointing is cracked, even rotten in places and some of the smaller joints have not been pointed at all. All in all it seems a bit of a botched job with plenty of opportunities for rain to get into the wall - that wall is pretty exposed and likely to suffer driving rain over the winter.
We’ll need to hack out the mortar and repoint the wall in an attempt to remedy the problem. We can officially claim this to be Hiccup #1 …
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We have walls.
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Posted in Journal of my barn conversion |
December 31st, 2007 at 3:41 pm
[…] We have stalactites in our walls! by mbc on December 23rd, 2007 […]