Diary update - repointing the bathroom wall

Tuffeau wall revealed in bathroom

As you know we love the look of the tuffeau stone blocks that the old farm house is built from, so we want to preserve as much of this beautiful stone as possible.

As we work our way through the main house, stripping out the modern plaster block walls, we are uncovering some fantastic tuffeau stone walls that with a bit of TLC will look gorgeous. 

We have stripped the downstairs bathroom and found that three of the walls are tuffeau.

The two longest walls are internal which means we could keep them exposed.   The external walls are being heavily insulated in an attempt to keep us warm in the winter and our fuel bills low.

Both of the internal walls were originally covered in lime render and limewash. One wall is in a sound enough state that, with a little careful cleaning, we can retain the original limewashed render. We will protect this with a few coats of limewash when the temperature drops a bit.

The other wall has not fared so well as previous owners of the house have removed large areas of limewashed render to enable earlier renovation works.  We have now removed all of this render and cleaned the wall.

Unfortunately the lower section of the wall is crumbling due to damp, so we will render with lime plaster. The beauty of this for an old house built without a damp proof course is that the lime render allows the moisture to escape into the room. The stonework is damaged in this and other rooms because during the previous renovation the walls were covered in moisture resistant plaster and concrete which trapped the moisture into the porous tuffeau, leading to it crumbling away.

From about 1m up the stone is sound so we are repointing the joints to give an authentic and attractive finish.