Working with Lime Mortar. Pointing stone walls. Mortier de chaux. Hacer juntas con mortero de cal.

hi I'm in one of our outbuildings today and I'm going to be doing some pointing and I thought I'd just show you some of the techniques that I use to get a good pointed joint now these walls are 300 years old and they are stone and they're laid onto a mortar which is just clay what's happened over the years some of the clays come out because it goes friable and I'm going to be replacing it with a lime based mortar using a hydraulic lime because that way the wall will breathe and also the mortar itself is quite elastic so it will give a little bit cement kills these walls they do not breathe they don't let any moisture through and effectively they start to crack very early on so that's what I'm going to be doing now I've made myself a little tool to clear out the old joints and to get rid of the loose clay and it's just a little bit of steel bar with that wooden handle and all I've done is I've just cleaned that right back any loose okay then I'm going to brush it and then I'll wet it after I mix up the water prior to putting the mortar into the joints so after raking out I'm just going to brush out the loose dust from the joints where I'm going to be working then I'll mix up the mortar and then I'll just wet these joints prior to putting the mortar in mixture the for the mortar is four parts sharps and to one part of the hydraulic line this is hydrate lime and it's NHL 3.5 so it's a an average ly hard lime and it's ideal it dries fairly rapidly I don't use iterative oil because it does take a long time to dry it's also very very aggressive to the skin and so when being a discretion being the better part of valor I'd rather use the to be the safer I mean of people trying hydraulic line soap from dry mixing it to get even texture and even color this is going to be a fairly dry mix the reason that too wet is that the water will not stain the style if it goes onto the front face of the storm also overworking a very wet mix of wine water tends to bring the line to the front face and it weakens the mortar further down in the joint so a dry mix to the courage to handle the other thing you can see while I'm doing this is I am wearing gloves when I'm handling this material I'm going to change to a more repressed waterproof glove when actually start handling it because it does really really aggressively attack the skin if you use it too much so always protect your skin when handling the waters not quite put a little bit more water but not a lot close to [Music] [Music] that's nice it's sneaking to the child quite nicely should be able to pick it up and it will stick to the small pointing to the width of the joint that I want good now is wet the wall down in the area I'm going to work if you've got a sprayer water sprayer that's great I've got something a little bit more fundamental basic mr. wet brush I've known people drink a glass of water then spray out my other mouth so NHS will do and then I'm ready to put big the mortar into the ranked out joint here I'll write it back to about about one inch back 20 25 millimeters deep in other areas it's deeper if it's big and deep such as here put a few stones in as well small stones because behind this pace there's rubble rubble and clay so we want to add something to that but the exterior face of the wall outside and inside the building a sauna so it's just that the inner bits to collapsed a bit but it's still solid ok now I'm going to change my gloves - forward - proof ones must take care of the hands let me start pointing so let's just take a small bit to the front the whole point about water is it's not to really bomb the stones together it's actually to hold the stones apart so what happens is that if you start to lose that water then the stones or the bricks can collapse tumble and that makes them all unstable so what I want is a miniature that's going to be rigid enough to give the supportive weight so I don't want it too stiff that it's going to resist the elastic movement that the war has and in these old walls they do have flexible bit of movement and the cement war will not cope with that as easily as a natural war like this now we'll all I've gone over these what I'm going to do I'll clean that off with a wire brush afterwards and they'll be no remnants at all of the line left on that what I've done so I'm going to cut this all here quite deep get plenty of water in can be painstakingly slow but it's better than having to build the whole hunt buildings and it will last probably another 300 years which ain't bad get a stone in there [Applause] and that's it just keep working away nice and steadily I'll be paid 300 years to do this the bad news is this ain't the part of all I'm worried about and to do a joint like this quite deep that's the thickness I want to go to about a centimeter so I make my piece of mortar about a centimeter thick and then work out which way I'm gonna put the mortar and I'm going to go in like that so I want to put it on this edge so I'm just going to cut a piece and mortar scrape it up the trowel and then you can go over to the joint once again set the mortar on the trowel into the joint and you can go quite deeply like that no problem at all because when I start to write the man there was actually pieces of stone that are touching here and there's no real need for it there so what I'm doing is the essential parts which are going to stabilize the wall up on the ladder it's a lot deeper the fissures are really quite they're quite worn out and there's a lot of clay has come out so I'm gonna be good doing essentially nearly every joint is going to need to be done and just in case you think I just hold the camera this is my bit of pointing and stone work from well I think it's about three years old now it's when we put this recycled glass window into the front of the house and we had to make up the difference between the woodwork I understand a really great thing about working on old buildings is that you've got so much interesting history that they show within the walls this long how she was a post house in the 19th century and you can see that the fireplace actually begins quite high up with a love love the fireplace and also the door begins really high up and that is because this was the cellar it was a walk-in cellar and presumed where they kept all the food for the inn and next door there is a massive fireplace and in here they could have roasted a couple of pigs by a look of it and they'd probably have been ready for them as well when they traveled by carriage all the way from the south you can still see these wonderful blackened beams which I presume was a smoke coming out from the fire here absolutely fantastic and here's the outside of the building and he's working on as he says it's about 300 years old possibly a little older because the chickens actually scratched up a couple of coins couple years back and they are money that feudal money and they are dated 1630 in 1615 so it's house with a great history well worth preserving thanks for watching

Channel: Organikmechanic

Views: 137,124

Rating: 4.7672415 out of 5

Keywords: lime mortar, natural building, eco building, pointing walls, renovating old buildings, working with lime, hydraulic lime, mortier de chaux, mortero de cal, cal hidráulica, restauración ecológica, rénovation écologique, brico ecolo, bricolaje, DIY, Organikmechanic

Id: -4MbOyjjDvA

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2013