Wattle and Daub

I mentioned a while ago that one of the old walls of the new office is made of stuff. This stuff is wattle and daub of indeterminate age, covered with more modern (but still of indeterminate age) layers of concrete and chaux.

Wattle and daub. The wattles are the thin straps of
wood, into which daub is pressed. Our daub is a mixture
of mud, straw, and animal hair, all of which could just be
stable scrapings.

This week we will start the process of rendering the old wattle and daub as well as the internal stone walls. We are starting with one of the walls of the office and the one wall of the staircase to make them pierres vues. Today we have to scrape out a lot of the gunk (mainly mud) in between the stones and then clean the existing stonework, which we have been warned will create dust the like of which we have not seen before. Tomorrow Stéphane will be filling the resulting spaces with a mixture of chaux and coloured sand so only the faces of the larger stones are visible. The chaux is CAEB90, an aerated slaked (hydrated) lime, which is traditionally used to render solid stone walls which need to breathe.

This wall is to become pierres vues.

More dust than we have seen before. We can hardly wait.

Simon