Firstly, apologies, you'll have to bear with me, i'm a complete novice :(
I've got a 3 bed semi, and upstairs the door frames are coming away from the wall... I have done some minor investegation and the plaster has cracked and come away, as has some of the "light brown" bricks behind that and a very small amount of the "grey" bricks behind them. They appear to have just become dry and crumbly and broken up...
Can anybody tell me why this has happened and suggest any ways to fix/stop it happening again? I know you'll probably need to know more, so please just ask.
Oh also, the wall in question is about 2inches thick and the part in question is the end of the wall that is in between 2 door frames at the end of the wall... the other side seems to have gone too, but i havent pulled it all off yet. It doesnt look like its been wet either....
I suggest you rephrase the whole question so that it draws a clearer picture. It's not at all clear what is going on. 2"-thick walls and two door frames at one end of the wall don't make a lot of sense. And where does the water come into the equasion?
Sorry yes, I'll try be a bit clearer... Its upstairs, there are 2 bedrooms split by the wall in question, there is also a cupboard with a water tank in it... so when looking at the wall, it has a door for the first bedroom, then 2 inches away a door for the cupboard and 2inches away from that the door for the other bedroom. The wall is only2-3inches thick between the rooms.
Water is the only thing i could think off that would make the bricks crumble, but other than the water tank which pipes arent near this part of wall there arent any pipes close... there is a cold water tank in the loft above this wall, but as i said its not wet now.
The "grey" bricks are more like concrete type substance behind the crumbly ligh brick.
I too have internal walls built with 2" blocks, black compressed clinker downstairs and plaster reinforced with straw (! - light brown?) upstairs. They are rendered with sand and cement and a top coat of plaster. Originally there had been an identical arrangement to yours - by the time we moved in, the previous owner had removed the cupboard and moved one bedroom door along to where the cupboard door was (effectively removing the cupboard from one bedroom). The old door opening had been filled with 2.5" studding and hardboard as the wall was so thin. When I came to remove the wall paper, I realised it was holding the plaster up and the whole wall was crumbling (mainly because it had been knocked about and the right-angles of the cupboard walls had been removed).
With hindsight, I should probably have knocked out all the upstairs walls at that stage and replaced them with stud walls, and I rather wish I had. But you never do, do you? I bodged it all up as follws:
Between the unmoved bedroom door and the new bedroom door/old cupboard door, I ran coach bolts through frame/end of dividing wall/frame, counter-boring them into the frame so they would be below the surface and used them to pinch up the frames on the end of the dividing wall to stabilise it and then filled the holes so you couldn't see them.
Around the changed doorways I restudded with 2" plus studding, the vertical parts cut overlong so they protruded into the joist area of the loft and secured them to the joists to give stability to the wall., up to the edge of the blocks which I secured to the studding. I stripped the loose plaster on the remaining blocks and covered studded areas with hardboard again (no depth/strength for plasterboarding) and got a plasterer to replaster up to the joins as good as possible.
After wall papering it didn't look too bad. The extra stability has prevented any further deterioration and it's lasted 15 years fine and the dodgy door way is now banged in and out of by a 13 year old son who didn't exist back then! It's OK, but, as I said, I should really have knocked all the walls out and redone them - it wouldn't actually have been that big a job (I now realise) then.
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