Cupboard with a view

Crack where the ivy grew

As we continue with repair work to the large crack in one of the original walls we have moved up to the first floor to brick up another old doorway through that wall.  It has been used as a cupboard for the last 200 years plus! Mark & Michelle cleared off 2 layers of old wallpaper inside the cupboard expecting to get to the render covering the stone work but instead they found a later layer of render with Ivy growing underneath it! 

It is becoming clearer that the big crack has been caused by ivy 

Chateau circa 1900

growing up the outside wall and finding its way into the old stonework. From the outside you can clearly see that the crack has the pattern of an ivy branch. I have some old photos of the chateau from about 120 years ago and the whole of this wall was covered in ivy. 

Day light coming in

Ivy does two things - it takes moisture out of the pointing in the stones causing it to dry out and crumble and then it also gets behind the stones and starts breaking the wall apart. It has been able to do the most damage where the two old doors where as in these places the wall is thinest. 

Once the later render was taken off inside the cupboard and the dead ivy cleared out the original render was easy to remove and expose the original 900 year old stone work. It also exposed something else - a nice view

Block work nearly complete

through what was now a very big hole in the wall.  So all day yesterday was spent building the new concrete block work to fill in this old doorway and give much more support to everything above. Hopefully tomorrow weather permitting we will be able to start fixing the outside of the wall.