Re: British (european?) kitchen counter electric outlets

On 16/06/2024 21:20, Don Y wrote:

On 6/16/2024 11:46 AM, Edward Rawde wrote:

"Don Y" <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote in message news:v4nb4p$5pn2$1@dont-email.me...

On 6/16/2024 1:16 AM, TTman wrote:

Yes. Our 'old'houses have internal walls made of either brick (4" thick) and plastered. it's hard to recess the brick to take
power sockets, but quite common. The cabling runs down the cavity (4") between the internal brickwork and external brickwork.

>
*TWO* brick walls between the occupants and the out-of-doors?

>
Yes it's known as a cavity wall.
Our house was like that, and there was no such thing as drywall (or plasterboard as it would be known in the UK).
The inside wall is plastered with plaster by the plasterers (people who do the plastering).

The house design he describes is relatively modern transition probably around the 1930's. Pre 1910 and solid wall is much more likely. Anything habitable built post WWII is likely to be cavity wall with two walls of 4" brick and some rigid metal ties between them. Modern build the cavity is typically filled with rockwool or PU foam and the inner skin is of much cheaper big breezeblock whilst the outer skin is proper brick.
There is an industry of cavity wall insulation retrofitted to these older originally air gap based insulation buildings.
There have been a few scandals where bad builders forgot the gap ties! Or worse deliberately left them out because of bad practice!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-37093904
Pretty serious to have brick walls falling down like that!
My own house is much older (early Victorian and of handmade imperial size bricks). Its outer walls are three courses of solid high fired Victorian engineering brick. It is difficult to drill through since there are enough nice round flints in the brick clay matrix to make drills snatch.
Last tradesman to try in my house ruined a core drill in the process and had to go off and buy another to finish the job.

Directly onto the brick surface?  Or, was lath/chickenwire installed to support
the plaster?

Sometimes they did use chicken wire to make thick plaster stay. Most houses they don't bother and the plaster is in two grades a coarse grey one with horsehair or other binder in it ~2cm and a final thin skim 3-5mm of pink plaster on top. Good plasterers are in great demand. Polishing it to a fine flat finish requires real skill (as does making it stick to a ceiling!)
Chickenwire plays hell with Wifi (as does the density of the brickwork). The thickest walls right in the core of my house are about 4' thick where the kitchen range used to be.

 How do you hang pictures?

Houses this old tend to have curtain rails and sometimes as is the case in my house a dado rail at furniture height in addition. eg.
https://www.thevictorianemporium.com/store/category/dado_rails
It is coming back into fashion.
--
Martin Brown