Re: British (european?) kitchen counter electric outlets

On Mon, 17 Jun 2024 15:16:56 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

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.

Some buildings here had plywood finished with bricks. They would lay a
row of bricks, add a few nails into the wood along the top of the
bricks, and add mortar and another row of bricks.

In our old art-Deco place on Judah Street, in the 1989 earthquake,
there was a 4-story apartment building next door, and all 4 floors of
bricks peeled off and hit the sidewalk. By some miracle, nobody was
walking there at the time. One brick could have been lethal.

The main killers in the '89 quake were the freeway collapse in Oakland
and bricks in SF.

(Google maps, 320 Judah Street, San Francisco, Street View. The
apartment to the right is shod in wood now.)

East Coast cities rarely have quakes, but a place like Boston or NYC
will be rubble when they do.