Re: British (european?) kitchen counter electric outlets

Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

[...]

The house design he describes is relatively modern transition probably
around the 1930's. Pre 1910 and solid wall is much more likely.

I don't know how common this was, but a house I lived in, which was
built in 1901, had cavity walls.  All the terraces of houses in that
area, which were built between 1895 and 1905, had cavity walls, even
though they were built down to a price for sale to ordinary working
families.

The actual materials were a very poor quality local brick for the
interior wall and Bath Stone (Oolite) for the outer.  The courses were
laid with gas slag mortar, which was made in a pug mill on site from
lime and the residue from the local gasworks.

During WWI a bomb went off near one of the terraces and the shock wave
propagated through the clay soil, jarring dozens of houses.  The houses
appeared not to be too badly damaged and the cracked mortar joints soon
repaired themselves (mortar is self-healing).  A decade later it was
noticed that  a lot of them were suffering from rising damp.  The shock
of the bomb had dislodged the mortar 'snots' on the cavity side of each
wall, they fell down to the bottom of the cavity and filled it to a
level which bridged the damp course with a load of porous wet material.

The builders had provided air vents on the outside and omitted
corresponding bricks in the inner wall, to increase the underfloor air
circulation.  I found it was possible to worm my way along under the
floor, reach into the cavity through the missing brick holes and pull
out bucketloads of the wet material by hand.  It was a very unpleasant
job but it solved the damp problem.


--
~ Liz Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk