My Daughter has just moved to an old farmhouse and in the garden is an old privvy complete with the original double seat and a child's seat (3 holes in a plank of wood). I'm not sure of the effluent removal arrangements at the moment!
It must be about 150 years old and nearly falling down, but it would be shame to just demolish it and I have foolishly agreed to refurbish it.
I have a few questions and your help would be appreciated.
It is brick built (solid as a brick s***house!) what mortar should I use to re-lay the bricks that have fallen out?
Assuming lime mortar, where can I get this?
What would have been used to plaster the walls and what paint would have been used?
It has a pitched roof but the timber is rotten. What timber should I use to rebuild the roof.
Should I use sarking felt to line the roof or is there an older version of this?
Finally it has no door at present, what style of door would it have had?
Thanks for your help and I will post photos as work progresses.
are you aiming to restore it to its orginal condition, or to modernise it with lights and heating etc?
I've been using lime putty because it is softer than the stones of my house, so if the house 'moves' the mortar will move, the stones not crack.
However you privy isnt that big so theres no reason to use softer lime mortar. More important is to get the colour as close to original colours for pointing, we used a mixture of white and grey cement, and specially chosen sand.
yes there is - the mortar should not be as hard as (or harder than) the bricks, or over time and weathering, the bricks will be sacrificial instead of the mortar!!
if they are 150 yr old bricks that's 1860...I'd look at the existing mortar and follow suit - without further clues I'd have to say lime mortar would be safest. Bagged lime from any good builders merchants - google for what to do with it to make "lime putty" then make that into mortar.
lime, without a doubt. 1 part builder's lime to 3 parts sand.
builder's merchants or many diy sheds
nothing I'd expect. If it is plastered, lime. 1 part builder's lime to
2.5 parts sand.
lime. Mix builders lime and water to make a putty, and dilute it 50/50 to make your paint. Such paints behave differently to what we're used to today, see
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It has a pitched roof but the timber is rotten. =A0What timber should I
rough treated softwood as used for outdoor jobs.
In 1860 houses were built with no lining, or in Britain sarking. So no.
Ledged & braced.
If you post a pic of the roof stucture, may be possible to say more
PS the other reason to use lime mortar rather than cement is that cement pulls the surface of brcks off when it eventually fails. And ocne tha thappens, the bricks gradually disintegrate.
Its basically use of hydrated lime instead of cement.
You can use it with some white portland cement added. Sets a bit faster but with caveats. There are some issues with certain ratios being worse than either on their own, that I forget.
I've used a mixtures of variable strengths (depending on what I wasn't running out of at the time) to build a garden wall. Its stood up OK.
horsehit, lime and horsehair over lath? Then whitewash or limewash.
If its a new rebuild over block, roughly render it with lime or cement mortar.
wood is useful in this context :-)
If you dont mind being a bit modern, 2x1 pressure treated rough sawn. Maybe 3x2, but I doubt if it was originally more than the odd broken bottom pole lashed to a couple of dead trees.
You might: lots of tiled roofs weren't sarked at all on outhouses.
You tend to use sarking not to keep water out, but to prevent pressure inside the structure with a vacuum outside due to wind pressure, blowing the tiles off. Most barns that are hugely ventilated are not sarked. Tiles,. laid properly, are perfectly capable of keeping the rain out.
'Ive got a couple of external tiled porches. No sarking. They dont drip water inside them at all.
My memory of such things is a sort of half door. So you could see over the top standing up, and see the feet under the door.
Later models extended to the floor but there was always a substantial ventilation gap and the top to keep the pong down to non lethal levels
My grandfather, who should have known better, as he was a cambridge educated civil engineer, had several he knocked up in his various houses. Last of the bloody Victorians I reckon. Think Fred Dibnah wiv a Nawfuck accent.
I dont want to disillusion you, but times were tight always, and whilst they usually had a concrete base for the bucket, the rest was built out of scrap. So, no DPC. if there enough bricks and halfbricks to make a wall full height, he would do that. If not it was a plinth wall and a timber superstructure. Clad in whatever he had. Lapboard Shipboard Old fence stuff.. Sheets of corrugated iron tacked on with galv nails. :-)
likewise the roof. One had pantiles. I am sure another had corrugated on it. Wood was again whatever was to hand. Lean to single pitch rooves mostly.
The door was generally a frame out of an interior doorway that had been salvaged, with a door made of T & G that almost fitted sideways, and never fitted top and bottom. Painted in whatever pain was left over.
The holey plank (;-)) was supported on half decent bricks, and the walls painted with distemper usually. Fittings consisted of a rusty nail, with a few sheets of tge daily express hanging on a string through the corner. Usually but not always there was an outside tap. Later on one even had cold water a basin and a half block of 'Lifebouy' and a towel roller. I am not sure there was ever a towel on that though.
We kids used to shudder at the mere sight of it. 'back home' wasn't grand, but we did have two flush toilets in it.
People here wonder why I am so cynical about 'Victoriana' - basically because I occasionally had to live in it. damp, condensation, persistent acute and terrifying asthma, cold, draughty, 50% chance of getting gut rot from fly blown meat stored in zinc coated larders..no hot water unless precious coal was loaded in the back boiler. And the thing revved to an inch of its life, to get a tepid dribble of rusty water in a rusty tin bath.
You can take Victoriana and shove it up yer three holer ;-)
Anyway, really all that, was to amuse, terrify, and make the point that authenticity in these matters is probably something you dont WANT to achieve.
Someone remarked in a review if Leslie Charteris, who wrote eh saint books, or was it PG Wodehouse and Wooster - anyway the phrase used was 'life, not as it was/is but as it ought have been/should be'
So I would say, make the bog like it OUGHT to have been. Not like it ever was :-)
I remember my dad telling a tale I think his father had related of the arrangements at work. Essentially, rather than a row of holes in a plank, there was simply a long beam on which users sat in a row. Beneath was a wheeled vehicle which was hauled away by a horse every so often.
Some wag sawed part way through the beam, with inevitable consequences.
Wasn't it the Romans who had the first toilet pranks? Their more sophisticated plumbing sometimes had a row of holes in stonework, with a stream arranged to flow permanently beneath. The trick was to wait until it was fully occupied, then introduce a small floating container with burning contents. Release it into the stream, and wait for the regular sequence of yelps as each user feels the heat.
It probably won't help you (apart from how to hang the door) but you might enjoy reading:
They used to "perform" over the end of the jetty at a local shipyard. Some of the local "yoofa" were very good shots with a catapult from a nearby bridge!
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Chris J Dixon saying something like:
Some of the older steelworks and shipyards still had bogs like that, well into the 70s, from direct recall. Yes, I remember the stories of burning paper floated down... :) Not that I ever did that, oh no.
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