I've been off sick with the flu (or something like the flu) for a couple of weeks, so I had to put garage-stuff on hold for a while. But now I'm better, so let's carry on where I left off.
The building came with a chimney sticking through a roughly chopped-out hole in the wall, like this...
This is what it looked like inside. The chimney was resting on a pile of blocks. I don't think it had ever been connected to a stove of any sort. It was yet another piece of unfinished bodgery.
I did think of painting the blocks black and making them into a spoof stove, just for a joke, but I think the humour would have worn thin after a week or so. I decided to get rid of the lot.
The pipe itself is a weird diameter (six-and-a-bit inches) for which no fittings seem to be available, I don't even think it's a proper chimney (just a length of random metal pipe), it lets rain in, it's in a less than ideal position between two doorways, and I'm not particularly bothered about having a stove in the place anyway.
Away with the lot of it, I say!
The pipe was attached to the internal wall by a bracket and one seized-up bolt. I could have painstakingly undone the bolt - but, I ask you, where's the fun in that?
Outside, the pipe was just resting on a strap which was bolted rather loosely into the wall.
The nuts came off easily, and as soon as the strap was off the entire chimney fell through the wall with a loud crash. There really wasn't much keeping it in place.
Inside, the pipe and its pile of blocks had auto-destructed in a strangely satisfying manner.
After a bit of wangling I managed to get the entire pipe out of the wall.
But then, of course, I was left with a rather haphazard hole in the brickwork. In a typical piece of bodgery, you can see that whoever made the hole realised it was a bit too big, and wedged a couple of bricks back in with what seems to be some sort of granite-hard concrete. It was so difficult to get those bricks out that in the end I decided to leave them in place.
Outside, the hole cleaned up quite well. Note the two replaced bricks at the bottom.
There wasn't time to do the whole job in a day, so I put a temporary cover over the hole for the night.
Next day. Out with the angle grinder. It's time to make some bespoke masonry...
I then test-fitted my cut-to-size bricks in the hole. That looks like it'll work.
Although I have my doubts about whether the building is a genuine 19th century blacksmiths's forge, it's certainly built in an old-school way, with lime mortar, rather than cement mortar. So I'm making sure to use lime mortar in any new work. I even matched the colour, which was possibly a bit unnecessary on a wall that's painted inside and out.
If you use cement mortar on a building made with lime mortar, bad things happen. My own house - built in 1906 - had been repointed at some stage with cement mortar, and it had pretty much destroyed the brickwork. I had to cut out the bad bricks and do the whole job again, properly this time.
This is a photo of the state of things, before I restored the brickwork. It looks pretty bad, but my neighbour's house, on the left, is worse. Some absolute cowboy has tried to repair a blown-out brick by covering it with cement, which is the masonry equivalent of repairing structural rust on a car sill with a blob of filler.
Lime mortar is lovely stuff to work with - far easier to handle than cement mortar. You chop it up like cake mix. Working time is pretty much indefinite. If it starts getting a bit dry, just turn it over a few times and it comes back to life.
Bricks going in the 'ole...
...and done. The indented brick at the bottom is one of the replacement bricks the previous bodger stuck in with concrete. The fact that it's not flush with the wall surface annoys me, but it's too late to fix it now. And anyway, the brickwork as a whole is fairly messy, so I shouldn't be too fussy.
On the right you can see the bricks giving way to concrete blocks. This is a blocked-up vehicle door, which I intend to un-block at a later stage. But you can see that the position of the stove - crammed in between two doors - wasn't ideal.
Outside....and rather weirdly the hole seems very small now it's been bricked up. It looked much bigger when it had a pipe going through it! Blocks on the left show where the vehicle door used to be.
I have given the bricks a quick slap-over with a bit of left-over white emulsion, just so the building looks respectable from a distance. Eventually, when all the doors have been un-blocked and all the brickwork repairs have been completed, I'll rub it all down and give the whole thing a coat or two of limewash. But for now, that's a job ticked off the list.
The building came with a chimney sticking through a roughly chopped-out hole in the wall, like this...
This is what it looked like inside. The chimney was resting on a pile of blocks. I don't think it had ever been connected to a stove of any sort. It was yet another piece of unfinished bodgery.
I did think of painting the blocks black and making them into a spoof stove, just for a joke, but I think the humour would have worn thin after a week or so. I decided to get rid of the lot.
The pipe itself is a weird diameter (six-and-a-bit inches) for which no fittings seem to be available, I don't even think it's a proper chimney (just a length of random metal pipe), it lets rain in, it's in a less than ideal position between two doorways, and I'm not particularly bothered about having a stove in the place anyway.
Away with the lot of it, I say!
The pipe was attached to the internal wall by a bracket and one seized-up bolt. I could have painstakingly undone the bolt - but, I ask you, where's the fun in that?
Outside, the pipe was just resting on a strap which was bolted rather loosely into the wall.
The nuts came off easily, and as soon as the strap was off the entire chimney fell through the wall with a loud crash. There really wasn't much keeping it in place.
Inside, the pipe and its pile of blocks had auto-destructed in a strangely satisfying manner.
After a bit of wangling I managed to get the entire pipe out of the wall.
But then, of course, I was left with a rather haphazard hole in the brickwork. In a typical piece of bodgery, you can see that whoever made the hole realised it was a bit too big, and wedged a couple of bricks back in with what seems to be some sort of granite-hard concrete. It was so difficult to get those bricks out that in the end I decided to leave them in place.
Outside, the hole cleaned up quite well. Note the two replaced bricks at the bottom.
There wasn't time to do the whole job in a day, so I put a temporary cover over the hole for the night.
Next day. Out with the angle grinder. It's time to make some bespoke masonry...
I then test-fitted my cut-to-size bricks in the hole. That looks like it'll work.
Although I have my doubts about whether the building is a genuine 19th century blacksmiths's forge, it's certainly built in an old-school way, with lime mortar, rather than cement mortar. So I'm making sure to use lime mortar in any new work. I even matched the colour, which was possibly a bit unnecessary on a wall that's painted inside and out.
If you use cement mortar on a building made with lime mortar, bad things happen. My own house - built in 1906 - had been repointed at some stage with cement mortar, and it had pretty much destroyed the brickwork. I had to cut out the bad bricks and do the whole job again, properly this time.
This is a photo of the state of things, before I restored the brickwork. It looks pretty bad, but my neighbour's house, on the left, is worse. Some absolute cowboy has tried to repair a blown-out brick by covering it with cement, which is the masonry equivalent of repairing structural rust on a car sill with a blob of filler.
Lime mortar is lovely stuff to work with - far easier to handle than cement mortar. You chop it up like cake mix. Working time is pretty much indefinite. If it starts getting a bit dry, just turn it over a few times and it comes back to life.
Bricks going in the 'ole...
...and done. The indented brick at the bottom is one of the replacement bricks the previous bodger stuck in with concrete. The fact that it's not flush with the wall surface annoys me, but it's too late to fix it now. And anyway, the brickwork as a whole is fairly messy, so I shouldn't be too fussy.
On the right you can see the bricks giving way to concrete blocks. This is a blocked-up vehicle door, which I intend to un-block at a later stage. But you can see that the position of the stove - crammed in between two doors - wasn't ideal.
Outside....and rather weirdly the hole seems very small now it's been bricked up. It looked much bigger when it had a pipe going through it! Blocks on the left show where the vehicle door used to be.
I have given the bricks a quick slap-over with a bit of left-over white emulsion, just so the building looks respectable from a distance. Eventually, when all the doors have been un-blocked and all the brickwork repairs have been completed, I'll rub it all down and give the whole thing a coat or two of limewash. But for now, that's a job ticked off the list.
