If You Thought It Was Bad Last Time..
Ahh..
The builders have started. Bright and early last Friday morning a party of four of us walked solemnly around each of the walls, the two of them tapping at various intervals to determine which bits were sound and which were not. The trouble is old lime plaster has a mind of its own. Once you start to remove one piece the chances are high that the rest will follow suit. In spite of appearances, so far, there is nothing too bad. Or so we’re told. The worst bit is to the right of the door in the photo above, where the cob itself is crumbling below the main beam, hence the temporary support from an acrow prop. It has apparently come about because modern cement render was at one time applied on top of the cob, proving the destructive potential of trying to combine new building materials with the old. The proposal is to rebuild this section of the wall with blocks made of cob.
I guess it’s lucky we’ve been here before. I am almost hardened to this sort of scene.
You can imagine the dust though. It has started to settle all over the house in an ever deepening layer, like snow on a winter’s night, enveloping everything in its path no matter what I do. How easily one falls back to the automatic response of passing an arm lightly across the glass hob before putting down the saucepan. Or wiping your shoes on the strategically placed mat upon leaving a room rather than entering it.
There is an odd, angular arrangement of cob and stone which still makes me think there might have been a window or some other opening here.
Next door is no better.
We presume the huge stone on the floor came out of that deep hole in the wall. Fear not, there’s no blood splattering the walls. Yet. At some point in the cottage’s history someone obviously had a decor change in favour of Dining Room Red.
But aside from the bonfire-in-the-making in the middle of the room, what is happening here? Could there still be evidence of dark goings on in the dim and distant past? Let’s take a closer look..
A corner piled high with rubble then bricked and boarded up? Oh-er.
It being Friday afternoon the time was ripe for a little light hearted speculation. Could there be a skeleton holed up in there? Treasure? A priest hole? Or something far more mundane, if no less worrisome, like a makeshift buttress for holding up a wall? The builders left us to ponder this new situation over the weekend and decide what to do. Maybe we should remove the board, and the rubble, and reclaim some extra space? Except then of course the wall to wall bookcase that Mike tailor made for this room would be wall to wall no longer.
It came as a flash of enlightenment in the middle of the night. The boarded up corner must be repaired, replastered and then left exactly as we found it. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before. Or to Mike. Or to the builders for that matter since they must have encountered it many times in the past. Something hidden in plain sight.
Please excuse the cobwebs. It’s been a while since the housekeeper last came this way. Quite possibly a couple of hundred years.
The blocked in corner conceals the structure of a bread oven, or Clome oven as they call it in Devon. Inside the fireplace there is a removable door giving access to this hidden void. Traditionally a fire would have been built inside the dome of the oven, using maybe gorse or blackthorn or something similar that could be obtained close by. As the oven has no chimney of its own the smoke would escape around the sides of the door and up through the main fireplace chimney. Once the oven was white hot the ashes were either raked out or pushed to one side. Bread or whatever other baking would then be placed inside and the door propped back against the opening to retain the heat.
Ovens like these are said to be the forerunners of the modern day pizza oven. Perhaps we should give it a try..
Onwards.
You two are intrepid. Big time. Just the sight of those two rooms in their present state was enough to make me gasp. Can’t imagine walking through them on a daily basis. But, as you say, onward!. In for a penny, in for a pound (…lots and lots of them).
Yes, the only way is onward now. It’s far too late to reconsider. It’s a bit of a leap into the unknown because with a building this old we never know what we will uncover, or how much it will end up costing.
What to say? It is quite tantalising seeing the history of the house and changes it has undergone over the years. Personally, I would want the corner by the brick oven left open and come up with a different bookcase solution – but I suspect Mike may not be too thrilled with that idea.
Never like to see Acrow props under a beam . . . always worries me what might happen if it failed. You sound so calm about the prospect of repair with cob blocks … good luck; I would bring gin but I’m a bit far away 🙂
I’m open minded about excavating further into the alcove (but you’re right.. Mike will disagree!). There is the risk of disturbing the structure of the bread oven and have it collapse, given how old it is, vs. how nice it would be to have more of it exposed. We shall be guided by the builders.
What a treasured find! A piece of the past that no one has seen for a VERY long time – and it’s all yours!
Putting the torch in there made us think what fun it would be to have it permanently lit up although that wouldn’t be very easy to do. Perhaps a flickering candle or tea light if we wanted to draw attention to it?
oh this brings back some memories of old beams and walls etc.. i grew up in an old house in connecticut.. we did some of this sort of thing.. although not with cob. we did have a bread oven though… looking forward to seeing all the progress and i am sure you are too!
This stage is always the worst. I shall be very relieved when they start putting things back instead of pulling them down!
The more i read your saga the more I am sure I don’t want to do any more remodeling. Which is silly given how much easier it is in a house built in the 1950s. But oh that dust etc. You at least have lots of interesting discoveries which is less likely to happen in our house.
Any renovation work is hard going. The pace seems so slow sometimes, but especially with this type of work. Lime plaster needs time to dry between coats and as a result the builders juggle a number of jobs simultaneously to avoid downtime. We’re rather at their mercy, it certainly isn’t a case of starting a job and keeping going with it until it’s done.
You’re gluttons for punishment 🙂 Seriously, though, it’ll all be worth it in the end.
There will certainly be a break after this one. Going from the bathroom straight back into it has been hard. But we’ve started early in the year for once so if we can get it done before the end of the summer then maybe there’ll be time to relax for a while!
Oh my you are brave, I should be scared to do this to my house in case it all fell down. And all that dust everywhere. What fun to find hidden spaces though. We have a bread oven too.
I am just trusting the builders to do the right thing. It’s the same firm we used for the bedroom and they made an excellent job of that. They do seem to know what they’re doing, having done work for English Heritage and the like.
Our house has a bread oven reached from the back of the fire in the kitchen, it was huge so we never used it even though it might have been fun to try it; I think it would have required a whole tree to get it hot. Like your other readers I think you are very brave, but I’m sure it will be worth it.
Now you should be making pizza! The English ovens are much smaller than the continental ones. It must have been quite a faff using it, the opening is so small. I hope it will all be worth it!
Well exciting times – love the little bread oven. I agree – you could have stoneground pizza for tea! As for the mess – a bit of crunchy dust. 😉 It’ll be so fabulous when it’s done. Relatives had a skeleton in their wattle and daub. Squirrel. They also had pine branches holding up a roof and not attached to anything much – a bit like being on a survival course but with the house attached and their kitchen beneath!
Squirrels get it everywhere, obviously that one was a little too curious! Anything went before building regulations came in. In our last house we took down a liner wall and found that one window had a table leg as a lintel.
It looks daunting. Did you expect something on this order? I should show your post to my husband – it would put our plan in perspective. We’re currently awaiting the arrival of an environmental technician charged with testing our walls for asbestos.
I must admit I was hoping that we’d get away with a little plaster patching here and there! Practically it’s not usually possible given the need to find sound plaster to attach to which is not always there. And actually the builders prefer to do it this way. It apparently makes it a lot easier to reconstruct, they can plaster a long run of wall each time. Re-patching takes much longer. As time is money who am I to disagree.
It is wonderful that you still have your bread oven, part of the history of your house. Ours was completely trashed and filled in with rubble.
Your rooms are a familiar sight but cob blocks and lime plaster are just the ticket. I know that you will manage all that needs doing and it will look absolutely brilliant when finished.
I do hope so… ‘brilliant’ is difficult to envisage right now!
Our last house had a bread oven in a similar state. And the one in the dining room here is filled with concrete!
I’m afraid to think how many of us your readers are having their own personal project difficulties put very much in perspective by the scale of yours just now. 😉 I, for one, shall go back to throwing pottery in my small kitchen with a revived sense of vigour… Must admit the discovery of a bread oven would be fabulous!
I wonder if you could use an oven like this as a kiln? It probably wouldn’t get hot enough. But maybe in days gone by the principle was similar?
Actually a good bread oven might get hot enough to fire a primitive (low-temperature) type of pottery. But the heating sequence is exactly the reverse of what is wanted in bread-baking, where one first heats the oven to the max temperature so the bread will rise well. If one did that with clay, all the ware would break! Raw clay contains chemically combined water, so it has to be heated very slowly past the boiling point. It is heated gradually just until it reaches top temperature, then simply allowed to cool. Unlike in bread baking, there has to be enough fuel in place to keep the heat building until that temperature is reached, or else it has to be stoked over the whole firing time. I think it would be pretty difficult to do all that in a well-engineered bread oven, and the house would get pretty hot if one did manage!
Hope you don’t mind a prolonged technical answer. It was an intriguing question, and I had to think about it a bit! 😉
That is fascinating, I had no idea how involved the process is. Thank you Amy. I think I would be on tenterhooks waiting for the pots to come out!
What an adventure! The dust is temporary. I speak from experience. It will all be worth it in the end. I beleive that those who inhabited your home before you would approve.
I hope they would approve. So much has been altered in this house in recent years and not all of it for the better. That makes it even more fascinating to dig deep and find evidence of how it would have looked originally.
I know it will be worth it in the end but what a lot of work you have to do. Having gone through many home ‘improvements’ over the years I know it is possible to live in chaos for a long time before we crack (or is that just me!) But I can’t imagine how awful it must be when you not only have to ‘destroy’ what’s currently there to fix what was there before and can only fix it with stuff that is no longer in use generally speaking! A mammoth task but having seen what you have previously achieved I know it will be excellent once more – eventually!
I don’t feel comfortable at all with destroying historic fabric but those in the know tell me that is how it must be done, it’s impossible to replaster over an unstable foundation because all the new stuff would just crack and fall off. Unfortunately much of the damage has been done by previous attempts at ‘repair’ using unsympathetic materials. And nothing lasts forever. Where the plaster or the cob has cracked over the years damp gets in and that just compounds the problem. You are right, it is sometimes necessary to destroy something in order to save it.
I’m panicking just looking at the pictures
Me too.. 🙂
Definitely go for restoring the bread oven! We have one in France – makes fantastic pizzas, bread, roast chickens…. manageable amount of mess, but heat can be a problem – my young adult offspring insisted on using it on a 40C day last summer…
I’m sure Mike could find a neat solution for the bookcase – and anyway, how likely is it the bookcase will still be a perfect fit after all this work?!
He is very worried about that bookcase and whether it will go back the same as before. The builders are under strict instructions to preserve the dimensions of the space. Still, it would be fascinating to excavate and see if there is more of the bread oven worth exposing, we shall have to see. As it is we could use it via the fireplace opening, it would be quite hard though. People in the middle ages were obviously much shorter and able to fit into smaller spaces!
I salute you for undertaking this project. I admire your adventurous spirit and am more than a little envious. Good luck with it all. I am sure it will be worth it.
Thanks Dorothy. Sometimes one can go into things without realising just how much of an adventure lies in wait!
You continue to amaze me and in a strange way I feel privileged to be on the journey with you. Although very grateful I dont have the dust.
It’s turning into quite a journey isn’t it. I’m not sure how I will feel when/if we finally get to the end of it. Perhaps we’ll need to start again back at the beginning, or start again somewhere else? One thing’s for sure, if I ever do this again, next time I’ll do it properly from a caravan in the garden. Away from the dust!
A whole new adventure! I’ll be watching.
Pizza oven! Yes!!!!!!!!!
I have dug in ready for another marathon project. Can it beat the bathroom’s eight months? Whatever, it will be a long wait for a pizza.
I much prefer to watch your renovations from afar rather than be in the midst of it myself.
Some people go on holiday while having work done on the house. I can quite understand why.
Golly, the size of the job, and the mess, is daunting. You’re very brave to live there through it all. I do hope you have a long and hot summer. Open windows would help with the smell and dust problems, or would they just make it spread? Perhaps keeping clothes in travel bags, or those sealed plastic boxes might stop the dust. I only say that because someone I knew had brick walls removed and found layers of brick dust in their wardrobe at the other end of the house ….
I will follow the progress from afar, and from a house that doesn’t need any alterations or restoration!
I opened one of the kitchen drawers yesterday (at the other end of the house) and as I took out a baking tray I thought, that’s a funny colour. Wiped my finger across it and yes, dust. Had to wash it before I could use it. I don’t remember having had a dust problem quite this bad before!
Oh my. I can’t even.
Good luck. I have 100% faith it will be amazing, but right now it makes me twitch!
You and me both! This is the scariest bit (I hope). Cob blocks and lime were delivered yesterday. I’m taking this as a good sign.
Always onwards – that’s the spirit!
‘Tis the only way to go.. 😉
It is very exciting watching from afar!
Not that far. You’re very welcome to get a closer view should you want to. I need all the support I can get. I’ll resist the opportunity to lend you a pinny and a broom!