Single Brick House Questions

Adding external insulated cladding is a reasonably routine operation, I'd be surprised if many mortgage companies objected provided it was done properly.

The main problem with adding a brick facing might be the need to provide a suitable extension to the foundations, and then suitable and sufficient wall ties would have to be included. It wouldn't really be viable unless you were replacing all the doors and windows and probably the roof, unless that had a large overhang.

Ive owned two houses with single brick walls, both bought with the help of a mortgage.

Mike

In all honesty if the location is good it might be easier to buy, demolish and rebuild...

I've seen a new house built INSIDE a *listed* exterior.

Slapping celotex on the outside and then skinning with brick or a timber frame and cladding is all very possible I would have thought. You would need to remodel windows and doors to so DG those.

check that you are allowed to do external work.

It might be "free" if you can get a grant for it, although most of the grants only offer partial funding.

External wall insulation: around £13,000 Internal wall insulation: around £7,400

Annual energy saving: £260

Payback time external: 50 years.

There are all sorts of problems with external insulation. How is it secured to the wall? How is it made weather proof? What about interstitial condensation? What happens round windows and doors. Will you need new windows and doors? What happens to external drain pipes? (Foul and rainwater.) What happens under the eves? What happens at ground level? What happens if it spans the DPC?

There have been some real crap systems about, you need to talk to someone who's had it fitted some time ago.

BTW, convention, A single brick wall is around 9" thick.

I converted my single brick house to a passive house with massive external insulation. Mineral wool and masonry outer leaf added. Roof extended & all new slates, concrete strip foundations. Been very satisfactory. Cheap because it was DIY.

Surprised you didn't mention Grenfall.

While everything you say is true, it is technically possible to engineer something effective in most cases. The devil is in the detail. If, for example, you were stripping out all the inside leaving the brick shell then internal insulation might be another option. Although, given the amount of penetrating damp I have seen on the upper back walls of Victorian terrraces, that's one place where external cladding makes good sense.

Depending on where it is, an unmortgageable cottage might actually be quite an opportunity.

Thanks for all your input everyone. Certainly, some things to think about, Cheers

Hang on my road is full of single brick terraces, and I'm sure you can get mortgages on them. They are not that bad. Some of the end terrace houses may well be worse of course. Is this just a ploy to suggest all such houses get demolished and then huge blocks of flats built instead? Bah humbug. Brian

I suppose for the sake of clarity we should really have confirmed that it was single brick, and not half brick. IIRC some Victorian terraces at the bottom of the market were originally built with a single story, half brick extension right at the back, sometimes an outside loo, sometimes a coal store. I used to stay in one such (with outside loo) on holiday in the 50's/60's.

It's just within the bounds of possibility that small single story half-brick structures might be found in remoter regions, perhaps originally built as animal shelters.

This detatched house was built in 1911 without a cavity wall, ie 'single brick'. I don't believe it was built for the bottom of the market - but it was built by a spec buider : 3 on this site and 4 on another site 100 yards away.

My BiL's fires house was a 1930s terrace in Rugby - again no cavity and my late boss' one in Harrow, buit between the wars also had no cavity.

charles formulated on Wednesday :

This is a semi, the main part built with cavity, except for an extra single storey part at the rear corner. That part was built as a coal store with an extremely large toilet room next to it plus a pantry in the main part of the house footprint.

Downstairs toilet was moved to what had been the pantry, then toilet became a utility, with the coal store remaining as a long narrow garden store with a separate door to the one for the utility. Its narrowness made it useless as a store, so bricked its door up and cut through from the utility - making it far more useful, with lots of shelves to the left and right, as a pantry again.

Harry Bloomfield, Esq. was thinking very hard :

I intended to say, despite the utility room being supplied with a rad, the cold in there compared to the main house, is very noticeable.

I wondered about that, as clearly a whole house with 4.5" thick walls wouldn't stay up very long. (I'm not familiar with the terminology.) Surely most brick houses build before cavity walls became common (about

You can build a garden wall 4.5 inches thick but 6 feet high so long as it has piers every 6 feet or so (and reasonable foundations). If you build something (say) the size of a single garage then the end walls help to brace the side walls.

I'm not saying it is desirable but that it is theoretically possible to build a small cottage at least partly with 4.5 inch walls.

Agreed

unless they were big

Lots of ways. As a simple example, imagine two "separate" 9 inch walls of conventional construction built next to each other with a pair of stretchers lined up on the adjacent faces of each wall. Now spin that pair 90 degrees. Another way is based on a "herringbone" layout.

Max Demian laid this down on his screen :

Bricks turned 90 deg, so they went through two leaves of bricks. for the bricks, same idea, but staggered - in through both side of outer, to the middle layer.

When I was looking to build an extension on the front of ours (single story porch and lounge bay thing) and as an aside we spoke to planning and they required permission for stone cladding (because that had 'thickness'), but not rendering or pebble-dashing because that apparently didn't?

Things might have changed since ... like the requirement to provide a parking space for every bedroom, even if there were none for the existing bedrooms previously?

One house locally (another EOT) has had the external cladding applied whilst keeping all the other bits (windows, roof etc) existing. I think the foam was about 100mm thick and then rendered with some sort of synthetic self coloured stuff.

The flank wall is South facing so it might help keep the place cool in the summer.

Cheers, T i m

That was ours when I first bought it. The small extension to the 'rear addition' was a full single brick though with 3/3rds of it an inside bathroom (off the rear extension / kitchen) and the remaining 1/3rd the outside (and only) loo.

Now the 'new' ss extension is the only bit of the house with cavity walls.

I did re-render the main flank wall (internally, pre plastering) with a thermal render of some sort (that was supposed to help). It was quite 'aerated' so I can see how it might. We have since considered lining that with some Celotex but never got round to it.

But what if you have a single brick built house that is designed to 'breathe' through the brickwork to some degree and then you seal it up with (especially) external cladding?

Sometimes it's the right place to have them ... and I don't only mean when you are working in the garage / garden. ;-)

Cheers, T i m