Phil Bailey Heritage Plastering: May 2020

Monday, 11 May 2020

moulding and stucco restoration part 2

Moulding and Stucco Restoration Stockwell part 2

Roof Dormers

Once the lovely scaffolder Terry had put up the scaffold (you don’t often hear the word lovely about scaffolders but I think most of them are deeply sensitive human beings who are trying to protect themselves. Do read my other post “When scaffolders cry ’ Anyway It was the best I have ever been on exactly the right height plenty of room to get to the working areas, brilliant .We started on the dormers

The dormers had been re- built in brick when the roof was renewed some years ago. A raking section running up to form the dormer roof We had to re-render it first using sand and lime before we ran the moulding round the window
There was no existing moulding from the original dormers so I copied it from the house next door a bit of a long way away so I could only guess at the actual shape .In truth most of the mouldings are the based on Greek and Roman geometric shapes so you can pretty much work it out from a distance and nobody can check it at that height so that's a bonus

brick formed dormers

We floated the background flat and made the running mould set it out in preparation to run the arch and architrave mould

running mould horsed up

setting out to run arch

A note on materials: Roman cement

In other parts of this blog I have mentioned that this type of work was at this time almost invariably carried out using Parkers or Roman cement what we now describe as a natural cement. A very fast setting clay/lime based dry powder you can recognise it by its red/brown colour and in this case some yellowy /buff colour elements Its quite an interesting material so widely used its production was limited for a while because of the coastal erosion caused by the over quarrying of the marlstone It was superseded by Portland cement in the later part of the 19th century but a very similar material is available and the more you use it the more you realise why they loved it Although in truth I am not sure it is exactly the same stuff but good enough. Where we can we use similar materials to the original and I know it’s a minefield of opinions but It works well and I cant be bothered to get involved as long as the owner was happy and got what she wanted

Arch head run

arch and archivolt run and joints made good

Render top coat finished

raking section mould at the top of the dormer

note the fish scale slates on the roof

A long distance shot of one of the finished dormers some say that my work always looks better from a distance

Incidentally, I don’t know why but it always pisses down when we do this type of work So if your garden needs a bit of rain give me a call

Tuesday, 5 May 2020

Roman cement Stucco repairs Stockwell London part 1

Restoration

Guildford Road Stockwell london part 1

The House in the 1990s

This is a house in South West London built between 1845 and 1850 by John Snell ltd. Described as an Italianiate style Villa. It was part of an estate built at the same time As you can see below the house has gone through considerable change so much so that by the 1980s the house lay almost derelict

Its maybe a little difficult for those new to London to imagine that much of the super expensive housing stock that is so much a part of the Capital today was in-fact in many cases in a pretty poor condition not so long ago. Many of the properties were too large ,damaged by war and neglect too expensive to maintain and maybe associated by many Londoners with wartime destruction and poverty

However where some saw as the dilapidated past ,others had the vision and energy to restore as beautiful homes. Judging by the state of it in this photo it had to be some kind of love (Although I have got to say I quite like the place as it reminds me of a different London but probably not if you don’t want to bring your kids up in an acid house crack den )

The salvation of this particular house is the work of a brave couple who took his place on in the 90s I understand that many of their friends thought they were mad when they took it on and you can see there point, its a massive undertaking. Unlike Grand Designs where Kevin try building up the cliff edge tension ‘But you have overspent there guys’ magically half a million quid appears Oh no they did it bit by bit bringing up two lovely kids no roof .no stairs no plaster on the walls I am amazed at some peoples' sheer determination

Over the years the owners had restored the inside, roof ,woodwork, lime plaster etc leaving only the outside to be repaired

While working on the inside of another house in this road we had walked past this house many times wondering who owned it and why they had’nt finished it. but we never saw anyone there. I half expected to see a mad cat lady slamming the window up and telling us to clear off

We finally spoke to the owner who turned out to be completely wonderful knowledgeable energetic and totally committed to the work of what to most people would have been a lifetime The owner explained that although she had had several companies round to look at the work most had said it was better to copy the existing mouldings and redo them in modern materials ,Its understandable most people like clean lines and uniformity. In this situation however the client wanted to repair the existing work keeping as much as was practically possible keeping the patinated surface of the original bare stucco with the repairs visible We explained that we tried to ,where possible specialise in authentic restoration using appropriate 'like for like' materials and we would like to give her a price to do the restoration as it would be great to work on Infact I would have probably done it for nothing if my kids didnt keep wanting to eat but I didnt tell the owner that or perhaps I did I cant remember
probably not great business practice that telling someone you would do it for a nothing
Anyway this is what we were up against