The crack

One of the things that worried me a little about the renovation of

the chateau was a large crack running right up the side of one of the walls of the oldest part of the chateau. What would have been the large hall with the two round pepper pot towers dating from at least the 1200's. As you can see in the first photo it is a very big crack! I thought that maybe it would require underpinning and bracing which could be expensive, especially as the walls of this part of the chateau are about 80 cm

thick. So this week we decided to investigate it and maybe try to repair it. Initially our thoughts were to try to just fill it in and then when we come back in the spring see if it has moved at all. When we really examined the crack closely we could see that the corner of the building was still straight in both directions. It was just that the wall where the crack was running bulged out. You could see behind the lower part of the crack where it was

bulging and it seemed that it was just the outer part of the stones that had started to come away, hence the bulging. The first thing we did was get Mark to start taking off all of the old render at the bottom of the wall so that we would be able to see a bit more of what was going on. Once this was done we noticed something. There were two vertical straight lines running down the through the stone work - see third photo. These looked like old windows or doors that had been closed off. So we

went inside the chateau and sure enough in the corner of the large salon on the ground floor there was a cupboard right where the lower line in the stones was on the outside. We ripped all the old wood and shelves out of this cupboard and there at the back we could now see that the wall was also cracked on the inside. From the size of this opening it certainly looked like there was a door here a long time ago. We then went outside to look at the wall again and could clearly see that this old opening

was something to do with the crack down the wall. Mark then asked me if there was another cupboard in the room above the salon. Yes of course there is! Now I remembered that not only was there another cupboard it was inside this cupboard that you could actually see the daylight coming in through the wall. So we went up to check this one out too. Again after removing the shelves we had another old doorway that had been blocked up and oh boy was the daylight coming through this one - see 5th photo (taken once we had really gutted the cupboard). Now it was quite clear what the situation was. Hundreds of years ago there had been two doors through the very thick wall in the old hall - it is quite 

likely that these doors were part of the original building judging from the way the walls are finished. Probably there had been some sort of a wooden staircase on the outside of the old Hall where the Lord of the manor would reach his private quarters on the upper floor.  At some point (most likely in the mid 1700's as we know that there was a major refurbishment then) these doors were blocked up and turned into cupboards. Back in the day there were no concrete lintels to support the thick wall above these doors, just 2 inch thick oak planks. The stone walls that these openings were closed off with are only about 20cm thick. The combination of these two factors meant that this part of the wall

 was a lot weaker than the main structure and over time has been moving and creating the large crack that we now see. So we needed a plan to fix this weakness. We decided that what I did not

really need were the two cupboards so they could go! We would dig out bottom of each cupboard and put in a good concrete base and then use concrete blocks to fill in the the cupboards, effectively making these parts of the wall as thick and strong as the rest of the walls. We would do this from the inside and then once completed we will be able to

safely remove the old stones that have bulged from the wall outside and rebuild it all, butting up to our new concrete bricks after again putting in a concrete base. So as I write this we are about a third of the way into the plan. I have cut the old hinges of the cupboard doors so that they can be safely removed and refurbished. Mark has dug out the cupboard bottoms, down to solid earth on the ground floor and down to the thick wall on the first floor. A concrete bas has gone in and once this is dry on Monday we will start with the concrete bricks!