Started a big rewire this week. At a rough guess, I'd say the house dates back to around the mid-to-late 1800s. It certainly started out as two or three separate terraced cottages, although it's all been knocked into one now and had an extension built on the back, although even that looks as though it must be about 100 years old.

There are plenty of those olde-worlde charms that some people look for: The old kitchen fireplace, a hand-operated water pump still standing outside, the walls faced with local stones set into mortar on the brick walls, and so on. It also has lots of other olde-worlde features, such as sagging floors, uneven walls, and not a single perpendicular or right-angle joint in the whole place!

It's the sort of building that some people just love for its Old English quaintness and character. "They don't build 'em like that anymore," they say.

Well, I see it a slightly different light. The bricks, and the mortar that supposedly holds them together are crumbling away. You only have to show that brick the tip of a drill and it disintegrates in a pile of red dust and rubble at your feet. Getting one fixture box securely fastened to a wall took well over an hour today.

After two solid days crawling through it, I'm now on intimate terms with the attic and roof. I'm sure you're all familiar with lath and plaster. Well on this house, they built the ceilings with straw and plaster! No kidding, it looks like they just fastened straw across the joists and then plastered over it. The owner was set on sinking about 4 downlighters into this ceiling in each room until I pointed out the fire hazard.

The roof itself is full of straw as well. Yes, they fixed straw across the rafters before the tiles went on. By now, of course, half of that straw has disintegrated. Any hammering of cable clips brought down copious quantities of dirt from what remains of the straw roof. Modern fiberglass insulation had been fitted, but by now it's just a filthy chewed up mess from all the muck floating around up there.
(By the way, there are still some thatched houses in this part of England where the roof is nothing but straw!)

Pulling up the second-floor floorboards revealed that the first-floor ceiling is the same straw-and-plaster composition. As for the bearers, it looks like almost every one has had chunks hacked out, replaced, or doubled up over the years.

All of the wiring currently in use is PVC sheathed, but with no ground on the lighting circuit and white instead of yellow on 3-conductor cables, which dates it to the 1950s or early 1960s. Somebody had already replaced the plethora of switch-fuse units with a modern C/B panel, but the old panels left behind suggest a 1950s rewire. (I even found some older lead-sheathed cables cut and abandoned under the upper floorboards.)

"Quaint," it might be in some people's minds. But I see it as a nightmare to rewire and do a halfway decent job.

In any civilized country, this ruin would probably have been bulldozed about 50 years ago!

O.K., that's the end of my rant. I feel better now... [Linked Image]