Lath & plaster ceiling filled with rubble.

[ElectronicFur]

Part of our ground flour lath & plaster ceiling was filled up with rubble. A 1 x 1.5 meter section was specifically boarded up on the sides, wood laid on top of the laths, and then filled with rubble. About 8 large bucketfuls of rubble. Surprising the laths have held it all these years. Whilst removing the rubble found a bit of a newspaper. No date visible, but advertised annual let of a pub for £80 per annum. So looks like the rubble has been there a while.

Could there be any reason other than laziness for this rubble to be present? It seems odd a box was constructed specifically to dump the rubble in. The section of ceiling is next to a chimney, but the rubble was only to one side of the chimney, the other side is normal lath & plaster.

Here it is with the wood on the laths and rubble removed. Was almost full to the top with rubble.

 

[Abi Cott]

Tidy roofers? I removed a 4" thick layer of rubble from my entire loft. Full to the depth of the joists across the entire area. I reckon it weighed approx half a tonne. It appeared to be "torching " from when the roof slates were turned. Somewhat more recent than your presumed date.

 

[malcolm]

I had a hearth made of brick laid directly on lath. The customary bit of newspaper was dated 1883 and the ceiling is probably late 1600s. The ceiling has moved a few inches but still hangs up there.

My hearth was directly in front of the chimney and had a bricked up fireplace. Could yours also have been a hearth with one side having been removed earlier?

 

[CliffordPope]

Crude fire break of some kind?

Aside - I read somewhere that most of the fires in big country houses in the late nineteenth century were caused by the introduction of steel girders to support hearths and fireplaces. Big timbers didn't conduct heat, they just smoulddered a bit at one end, but steel sent the heat straight to the rest of the wooden floor structure.

Our house has the slate hearths in the floor supported on additional short half-depth wooden joists and nogins, so that the hearth is flush with the boards above. The underside, visible below because the joists are all exposed, is planked cross-wise to the floorboards, creating a feature above the downstairs fireplaces.

 

[dandrew]

In my 1839 tenement in Glasgow the spaces between the joists were filled with ash, local legend was that is was for noise insulation. The lath and plaster ceiling supported the weight without any problems.

David

 

[MatthewC]

I am always impressed by workers in the past who achieved amazing things without the tools that we take for granted. However, it must be said that they did not always work to such high standards and occasionally one finds something which was indeed a laziness/quick fix short cut, ignorance or just plain amateurish. In no particular order:

1. Concreting up to the wall of the house was a major irritation (I know that was probably in the 1950s)
2. Taking a pipe from my water supply to my neighbour's outside tap was a bit of a cheek (that was lead so quite a while ago)
3. Installing a supporting wall under the lounge floor which was only an inch from the outside wall was asking for trouble - it filled with rot and so encouraged dampness.
4. On the same floor, resting a joist end on infill rubble was also asking for trouble
5. Cement coping on the hips of a slate roof was very silly.
6. The brown lacquer stuff on the internal doors was a nightmare to remove
7. In a lath ceiling using bits of (only) 2x2 as joists (some were 3x2) but they were being re-used from somewhere and already had a one inch notch in them.
8. Making a 30 inch cut-out in a 7x2.5 joist in the bathroom floor so that the foul drain from the repositioned loo could angle across to the original hole in the wall. The cut out took out 5.5 of the 7 inch depth!
9. Finally, (at the nearby church) The skillful copper worker who did a truly amazing job on the copper roof, but also chased a groove for the gutter upstand which was so deep that the 60 foot parapet wall started to lean.

I'm sure there were more here but at least we didn't have rubbish left in the loft!

 

[ElectronicFur]

Could yours also have been a hearth with one side having been removed earlier?

I don't think so, as it's in a walk-in closet, and from the brickwork I believe that closet has been there since the house was constructed. The chimney is from the fireplace in the hallway below.

At first I thought it could be some sort of firebreak, but I don't think it as it's only on one side of the chimney, and as well as the chimney, perpendicular to the chimney there is an internal brick wall right next to where the rubble was.