cladding on front of house

[Sam]

Hello,

On the front of our house are some "tiles" of cladding. It was probably considered very beautiful when the house was built in the

1970's but today it doesn't look so nice.

A house at the end of the street had the bottom few rows of "tiles" removed to have a porch fitted. I'm not sure how they did that because the tiles overlap, so I would have thought you would need to remove the top row first and work down the front of the house. How did they manage to work bottom-up?

We would quite like to remove the cladding but our neighbour (not a builder) has told us that the cladding replaces a brick. he says that house walls are normally two bricks deep but in our case they are one brick and one tile deep. he says if we remove the cladding, we will in effect half the thickness of the wall and be cold. Surely one tile cannot replace a great thick brick?

What is likely to be behind these tiles? Would it just be battens of wood fixed to a brick wall? We don't want to remove the tiles to find it looks even uglier!

Since they go right to the apex of the gable end, I think we'll end up getting someone in to do the removal since I don't have a ladder or tower that high.

Thanks.

[Owain]

They smashed the tiles with an ammer.

Sounds daft to me. Maybe in the days of solid brick walls rather than cavity, some builders economised with a more economical bond and a tile cladding.

If the original brickwork was never intended to be visible, it may not be of the highest standard.

Owain

[Bob Mannix]

The brickwork may be one or two bricks deep but, if tile hung and of a certain age, is likely to be solid with no cavity. The tile in this case does replace the outer skin but not primarily for insulation - to prevent penetrating damp. An alternative is render. You often see houses rendered just on the top half - these are sometimes (as was one I had -c1928-, but not always) cavity construction downstairs and solid wall upstairs.

I concur with the view about brickwork not intended to be visible!

It is possible they are merely decorative but the builder's view (even if only partly right) seems to indicate otherwise.

I would not proceed at all until the underlying wall is fully understood. Find a spot where the bricks are exposed a bit and drill a hole, if you are serious. Use a 12" drill bit and then the overall depth and whether there is a cavity can easily be assessed during the drilling process

[Andrew May]

The OP talks about the property being built in the 1970s. I would have thought that given this it is likely that it was cavity construction with the outer skin of the upper part being built from concrete block in order to reduce cost and then faced with tiles.

Andrew

[TheOldFellow]

I had a house once that had tile hung panels on the front. It was about 1970 construction IFIC. Behind the tiles were battens attached to a straw or oriented strand board - and that was instead of the outer brink leaf. The house was very cosy.

Elsewhere on the estate people had removed the tiles and put uPVC cladding on instead.

R.

[Sam]

Hi.

Thanks for the fast replies.

There seems to be a bit of confusion. the chap who told us the wall was one brick thick was *not* a builder, so mist likely does not know what he's talking about ;)

It is a reasonably modern build: mid 1970s so I would have thought it would have been built with cavity wall insulation. Certainly the other three sides of the house are.

I agree that what lies behind may look less pretty, but we could replace that with other cladding. I just wanted to make sure the cladding was decorative and not thermally important.

Thanks again.

[The Natural Philosopher]

It might be a stud wall alone.

Check on the inside..have you g e.g.celcon block walls? or plasterboad?

It MIGHT be celcon actually - goodish insulator but not weatherproof.

Or weatherproof.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Thermally no, weatherproof, yes.

Render or gasp - pebbledash would be suitable replacements. Or timbers or even PVC sheet lapboard.

[Autolycus]

Straw boarding - Stramit was one brand - is one of the worst manifestations of 1960s nadir building.

Muck out a stock-yard and you'll see what this stuff goes like when a bit of moisture gets into it.

They used to use it as flat ("got to be flat, so a nice pond forms to keep it cool") roof decking.

[<me9]

Mine is of that vintage and there are sections clad with weatherboard. Others houses nearby of similar age are clad with tiles. A lot have had it replaced with upvc cladding.

The wall has an inner leaf of block, and attached to the adjacent outer is a wooden frame of 3x2, to which the tiles/cladding is attached. behind this frame is a layer of fibreglass quilt (1-2") for insulation, and the frame is covered by slaters felt underneath teh cladding/tiles.

[Skipweasel]

If it's like ours, it's tile, battens, builder-paper, very thin insulation and plasterboard, with a timber frame holding it all up. Very cheap, very fast, very 70s.

The problem is that the insulation isn't very good, particularly as over the years the draughtproofing starts to go downhill.

The commonest solution round here is to strip the tiles but leave the battens. Kingspan is then screwed to the woodwork and then screeded over bringing the finished surface to just behind the edges of the window sills. The results are reasonably attractive, generally finished either painted on the screed or with pebbledash.

I don't fancy it myself, and since I managed to score a couple of barrowsful of tiles from a house being done nearby I intend to strip the tiles /carefully/ and upgrade the insulation and draughtproofing, then replace the tiles.

[Skipweasel]

Here the ground floor is brick outer leaf with a timber-framed plasterboard on the inner. Upstairs is the same timber frame with plasterboard inside, tile-hung to the exterior.

[Frank Erskine]

That's virtually the same as my 1970-ish pile (a dormer bungalow is what I think it's referred to as). The gable-end is 'normal' brick/block cavity (which has CWI), but upstairs both front and back timber-framed window areas are plasterboard inner and green Marley tiles outer with little betwixt. Just the other week a neighbour had this 'cavity' filled with Kingspan and the tiles replaced with (yuk) PVC cladding. I might consider a similar project if I can avoid such cladding. It's true that in strong winds the tiles do rattle quite a bit, so some alternative may be advantageous.

[Skipweasel]

Odd, even here on a very exposed situation and in a wind-funnel from other buildings we don't get the tiles rattling. They come /off/ from time to time, but they don't rattle! Which is another reason I'd like to strip the lot and put them back over proper insulation but with new nails.

The house I cadged the spare tiles from (I know I'll bust a few getting them off so a barrow or two of spares will be handy) had the tiles fixed wtih aluminium nails, which certainly wasn't original and there were clearly two sets of nail-holes. Why they took them all off and rehung them without improving the insulation while they were at it is beyond me.