Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Creating a doorway in a stone wall
Whilst the guys have been working on replacing the slate roof I have been bashing a hole through a thick stone wall to make a doorway between the future kitchen and sitting room.
All the walls in
the cottage, like the majority of old Breton
houses, are built with stone and mud and range from about 60cm to 80cm
thick. They are amazing sturdy and robust.
Before starting, workout were you want the hole and markout the size plus a bit extra for the width. I used orange fluo spray and made the opening 10cm wider each side than I wanted. The reason is that the stone overlaps quite a bit and often there is a really large stone right where you want the edge. It pays to have a little flexibility.
Unfortunately I forgot my camera yesterday so you'll have to visualise what I'm talking about. Obviously to stop the wall collapsing on your head it needs some support, so start by making a smallish hole, or holes, above the proposed lintel height to slide a heavy duty bit of wood through. In my case I only made one hole for a 1m wide opening because I also had two existing beams set into the wall. Usually the beams go most of the way into the wall so I used them and the extra central prop. Use some spare planking and big nails to 'lock' the whole lot together to prevent twisting. Also nail the acro props top and bottom. A little errant driving later with a wheelbarrow full of concrete could spell disaster.
Once everything
is secure it's time to start tunneling through. It is a bit scary and
stuff does just suddenly drop down from above, so basically take care.
The hole will end up being a lot bigger than you expect because of the
nature of the stone wall. Once you have made the initial hole a crowbar
and a lump hammer should be sufficient to excavate the whole thing.
Don't be surprised about how much stone and mud comes out of the wall. A little tip, during demolition take the stones, especially the larger ones, out by hand and toss them to the side. If you let everything fall to the floor at you feet it's a pain later on as you work down the wall to clear up the mess, especially if your acro props are too close and you forgot to put some old board down to make shoveling up easier. Note how the wall 'collapses' in a triangle shape.
Once the hole was
opened up to the correct size and all the
rubble was cleared up it was time to repair the damage. Using an old
door and some planks, I clamped some vertical supports each side of the
wall to the required finished size of the opening. These vertical bits
of wood are used to nail the shuttering on to so we can backfill with
concrete. I'm using concrete because the wall is going to be
plasterboarded later. Starting at the bottom (!) nail short bits of
planking, one or two at a time, to the vertical pieces and pour in the
concrete and some old bits of rubble to pad it out a bit. Basically
work your way up each side a few planks at a time tamping down with a
stick to ensure the mix gets into all the crevices.
With several barrow loads of concrete behind the shuttering I made sure the planks did not 'pop' off by adding some bracing between each side of the door to hold the shuttering in place.
By the end of the day I had managed to shutter up to about 1m 50cm on each side and decided to leave the whole lot to set for a day or two before tackling the lintel. Hopefully things should go smoothly.
| 9:01:46 PM
brittany
renovation
