stone walls

I live in an old cottage with exposed stone walls. It's freezing! Is there anything I can do to stop the stone sucking up the heat?
thanks

Move south!?? Do your walls have a DPC installed? These old stone walls are frequently rubble infill and hold a lot of water in winter. Apart from knocking them down and rebuilding on new footings the only way I know to DPC them involves copious amounts of DPC compound and an injection machine.

Scrit

Honestly? - I'm not sure. I'm a complete novice here. How would I tell whether I've a DPC? - the walls are dry and there are no problems with damp anywhere in the house except for an occasionally leaky cellar.

As for moving south - I'd rather be cold!

You didn't say how old your house was and how thick the walls are. Have you checked the walls with a moisture meter (when the temperature is above 5 degrees otherwise you'll probably get a false reading)? How well is the house insulated? Do you have double glazing? What are the floors made of (flags?)? How good or bad is the pointing in the masonry? Do you suffer from draughts? How is the house heated (gas, C/H, electric)? Sorry, but mylast house was built in 1605 - stone walls, rubble infill, rising damp, the lot. It took quite a bit of sorting out to get it dry and warm and all the above were factors. If your house is grade listed then you'll find it difficult to do anything which meets the BCOs (Building Control Officer's) requirements. One thing we did do (in the Victorian bit at the back) was to line the walls with Kingspan panels, although that will lose you 4 to 6 inches (or more) off each side of your rooms.

Which part of Yorkshire are you in? We're up in the Pennines (W. Yorks)

Scrit

Down here in Cornwall houses often have exposed stone walls inside. Usualy done by someone who thinks it looks nice and dont have to live there. I think it looks dark and cave like... What we have found is the mass of the rock in a wall takes ages to heat up but remains as a store of heat for a long time after... Medievel kings used to send a fire lighting team three days ahead to get castles warm for them!... haveing said that if i had the money i'd do as Scrit says and line inside with insualtion and if posible have double glazeing. If not (and we cant have it as our house is listed, im thinking of internal insulated shutters!...

I like your thinking - I'll send my personal house-warming team ahead of me whenever I leave work...

Thanks for your replies.

Scrit - it's a 150-ish year old Holmfirth weaver's place with rubble-filled walls and you're probably right with the combination idea. It's half flagged (other half floorboarded) and draughty and I haven't done the moisture metering so I'll go play with those.

Apart from that, the rendering seems good and in another house the heating would be fine!

Thanks for the tips. It's my first day on here so I'm a pretty satisfied customer. Are most of the fellas on here pros or are you all the people I see in B&Q on a Sunday?!

cheers

I bet you any money you'll find the walls aren't as dry as you'd like. Knocking-down and rebuilding the walls in our last house wasn't an option, so we pumped in a chemical DPC - it used 12 drums on something the size of two terrace houses (the stuff we used, they'd reckoned 2 to 3 drums per terrace house). We'd already stripped back the old lime plaster and 100 years of cobbled-up patchwork plastering then the walls were cement screeded and replastered (this was in the older part of the house). When it was done it didn't look much different to how it had been originally, only a lot better, and it was a lot warmer. Water was previously being wicked-up the rubble infill and freezing us in winter. Plaster is also an insulator, so bare stone walls tend to be cold. Another thing that made a difference was a substantial amount of rockwool in the attic. If you've got flagged floors they are cold. My current kitchen and living room has those - they look nice but they freeze your feet in winter so I'm going to put in a floating timber floor to get round that next spring.

I know the foregoing isn't very conservation-minded, but our last place had been hacked around so much that there wasn't a lot left to conserve other than the mullioned windows (left them single glazed, but with secondary 2-layer double glazing inside).

We live in the Calder Valley, so I know the sort of weather you get in Holmfirth!

BTW, I'm a joiner and furniture maker - only a builder out of necessity, I might add. B & Q is a Sunday DIY job - our local one sells banana wood and dodgy screws, but they are open when no-one else is, so useful at times.

Scrit

couple of cheep things ive found useful. Im sitting ar the foot of the stairs now and we have coverd them with a heavy curtain, cos i used to be able to feel the cold air tumbling down on me!....The front doors also i replaced (with a ten quid one from a double glazeing place that had just ripped it out of someones house) and thats made 100% diference to the drafts! the loft is going to get 11" of new insualtion in the spring too (on a grant)

Thanks fellas - I'll be spending the next few weeks plugging draughts. I'll also be looking at some sort of throat restrictor for the fire and taking some damp readings.

I'll keep you posted

Go here and ask the same question. Be cautious about doing anything on an old building before you understand the implications. MANY buildings have been ruined by inappropriate work, or at best it may just cost you a lot of unnecessary money. Prime moneywaster is the dpc. As an example, clunch buildings which have been ok for hundreds of years have been destroyed by injecting dpc asnthe moisture was giving the walls stability.

Agreed that DPCs require careful consideration before going down that track, but I'm afraid that I see far too much of the elitist approach being advised by conservation experts - people who don't have to live in or with them, or to pay to heat them in the Pennine winters. If you buy an excellent building in a vernacular style which has some merits, then I can see the point of conserving, but when the building has been through hundreds of years of use and several changes of use in its lifetime just where do you start and where should you draw the line? Buildings are meant to be lived in and to be used - they are a machine for living in, and not a museum. I suppose that makes me sound like a phillistine, but as a country we have a lot of old building stock only a small percentage of which deserves preservation. Our attitude towards conservation at all costs (at least in some cases) sets us apart from other countries in Europe who frankly consider our mania for preservation of the good, bad and generally indifferent as just a bit potty.

Scrit

It's not a matter of being elitist. There are many examples of building damage that "modern" procedures inflict. There's no point in going through all of them, but two common ones are draught proofing and repointing. The draught proofing, often associated with installing double glazing is done without considering ventilation requirements and so damp and mould growth occur. The new building regs are now unachievable as the ventilation requirements conflict with the energy saving requirements so you can't have both. Repointing is another damp associated problem, where as well as possible damage to the block/brickwork, the amount of moisture in the wall increases because it can no longer escape so easily when the joints have been filled with a cement mix instead of the original lime.

As for being potty, Britain has not looked after buildings to the extent the continental countries have. Since WW2 where continental countries had extensively reconstructed the damaged buildings, Britain was demolishing and replacing with utility type architecture. One of the worst culprits for this was Harold Macmillan just after the war.