Internal wall, between small toilet and bathroom:
Just wondering what type of wall that is called and if you could give an approximate year for the build of the house.
Cheers
Lath and plaster. Brickwork doesn't look that old to me. But lath and plaster goes back to medieval times AFAIK. Plasterboard came in post WW2. An outside view of the house including windows, doors, roof would be easier to date.
Yup.
They called it wattle and daub then. Build a wall of vertical sticks and weave willow horizontally through them to make the wattle and then daub mud, straw and manure over it. This was later refined to make lath and plaster.
Agreed.
Guy
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Lath and plaster. The bricks look very similar to those of the 1930's semi that I was brought up in, that had some lath and plaster walls and lath and plaster ceilings. I wouldn't like to say the building you have is 1930's though.
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Posting through "newshound" as all gmail and googlemail posts are blocked to prevent spam.
David,
At a very loose guess and in the absence of any visible stonework, I would suggest that the house was built between 1920 and 1950 - and the wall that you are referring to would be called "lathe and plaster" (using the old black mortar as the 'plaster').
And as newshound said, an external photo would give a better idea.
Cash
Thanks for the replies, very interesting. I know the ceilings upstairs are the same - lath and plaster.
This is a shot I got from Google Maps, it's the one on the left with the new porch which was built in 2002.
my best guess would be 20s or 30s.
NT
Yup. Typical speculative estate. You'll likely find a 9 inch breeze block wall behind the render upstairs. Shortcuts to save building costs all over the place.
Your Land Registry entry will contain something along the lines of "Title commences with a sale from $Builder's name to $Original purchaser" with a date. It'll cost you 4 quid to find out, if you've lost or never had a copy.
It might be a fully sarked/boarded roof - i.e. one with wide boards laid across the rafters rather than just battens and felt. Inside the loft you would not be able to see the backs of the tiles. (also common for the age)
You could try the House Dating tool here:
David
I see, ISTR someone who came to check if we could get cavity insulation saying that.
So are these houses not as solid then, compared to, lets say a new build?
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Interesting, from what I can remember, in the loft, you can just see some sort of black plastic running behind the rafters.
Cheers
The external wall in your photo looks like it has plenty of headers (bricks laid with the end visible) which would make it a solid wall.
Chris
They're solid enough, as witness that they've been standing without problems for nearly a Century now, and buildings using similar techniques have been standing for far longer. The breeze blocks are heavier and less insulating than modern substitutes, but at least as solid if used correctly. Solid brick walls of the type you've got downstairs have been known to last Centuries, just look round a lot of Stately Home garden walls. The corners they cut then aren't the same ones they cut now, and are not the dangerous ones the Victorians cut, is all. They also didn't have computers to design the structures, so a bit of extra material was cheaper than weeks doing calculations by hand. They'd use what their boss taught them to use, and what the tables in the book said would work safely, and they'd had the benefit of learning from the mistakes of the first industrial scale housebuilders in the
19th Century, often by watching their work fall down.I see that yours has had a new roof, and I'd guess the structure was perfectly good when the work was done, with just minor bits of wood like the battens needing replacement, as long as the maintenance had been done properly.
In some ways, they're better built than your average modern rabbit hutch, and there's enough meat on them and room in them that adding insulation to bring them fully up to modern specifications isn't too hard. Modern stuff is so close to the limits that sometimes you don't have enough structural strength to add a loft conversion easily.
I've just made an offer on a place of simlar age, and it'll cost about a grand extra to insulate all the outside walls to modern standards while I'm redecorating, and adding a foot of loose roll insulation to the loft will take care of that for another couple of hundred. A larger house with the same thermal performance as a rabbit hutch for about half the price of new build, in fact.
That'll be because the roof tiles have been replaced fairly recently (1980/ 1990s? Going from the style). It was the fashion then to use a synthetic felt for such work, and the original boards may have been rotten, which was why it needed re-roofing. The new (Marley Concrete?) tiles are heavier than the originals which can be seen on next door's roof, so the boards may have been taken off to save stressing the roof structure too much.
Who would want to live in a newbuild? ie a newbuild on a housing estate not a newbuild that you have personally designed.
All very interesting, there is no insulation whatsoever on the walls, will it only cost you a grand to insulate the outside walls? I'm trying to encourage my parents to get some insulation on the walls but the fact that it will involve quite a lot of upheaval to the quite newly decorated house puts them off and also the fact that we will loose some space. It is really cold in winter. Would insulating the walls from outside be significantly more expensive?
We had a loft conversion and the roof replaced in 2001, I was quite young then so don't remember much. What I do know is, the loft conversion is my bedroom and its bloody freezing, there is no insulation between the rafters, only under the floor boards between the joists.
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