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Post by westender on Feb 2, 2011 21:31:44 GMT -1
Westenders in substantial buildings... a warning.... don't get yer repairs done on the cheap!! Skilled stone workers and construction workers on the scrapheap as cuts bite. Just when we really need them, as the buildings really start to feel the effects of the last two winters. The roads are full of potholes caused by contracting and expanding ice cracking the fabric... the buildings suffer just the same and don't undergo anything like the same level of running repairs. Hunter & Clarke, a longstanding prestigious company that recently undertook the latest refurbishment of the Kelvingrove fountain, has went bust. They had the reroofing of the uni on their books as well. Our buildings are really going to suffer. This is really bad news. www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/exclusive-skills-warning-as-building-jobs-lost-1.1083038I'm always very aware when walking past ornate sandstone, of the fact that the boyf was nearly killed a few years back when a huge chunk of statuary fell off a building in George Square and landed literally a foot away from him. If it had landed on him he'd have been a goner. He was also in the St Enoch centre when a large glass pane from the roof fell in... Everything is falling apart. |
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Post by bormes on Feb 2, 2011 22:11:53 GMT -1
The Victorians in particular left wonderful legacies to Scotland not least their buildings, yet despite our oil wealth, very little finds it's way back up to Scotland.
No wonder the S.N.P. have done well.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 2, 2011 22:24:37 GMT -1
<head in hands> tell me about it  I only have my own recent experience to offer. Back in June/July, oh and August and into September.... we had stonework repairs done on the exterior of our building. I live in a Victorian terrace which has a columned entry porch shared with the house next door that was showing signs of wear and tear. Like bits falling off it ;D I was not convinced at the time by the quote nor the quality of the contractors but eventually caved in under the relentless pressure of a particularly bullish next door neighbour that this cheap quote was worth the money--- and I was outvoted by the other two neebs. The job was supposed to take four weeks. Sixteen weeks on, the scaff was still up and progress was slow and patchy, some days nobody was there, having been pulled off the job to go work on another. AND those that did the work were clearly colour blind, replacing the weathered blonde sandstone with what appears to be bright yellow icing. People don't seem to want to pay for artisans these days, preferring a quick patchup job. I will never make the same mistake again. |
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Post by ozneil on Feb 2, 2011 23:03:41 GMT -1
Same everywhere Stonemasons here can demand anything. Funny thing is masons are generally Scottish & Italian. Westie there were enough shonks around in Victorian times, its not a modern phenomenon. On stuff I was working on in Glasgow common "faults" in Victorian buildings were Stone laid with grain vertical instead of horizintal (Bloody sight cheaper to buy & easier to work). This results in stone "spalling" as in Rolo's columns or even as seen in heading pic here. Water gets into layer freezes and expands so outer layer falls off. Creation of "mouse runs" On high skirtings there are 2 pieces of wood set horizontally to hold them in place. The space between them should be filled with plaster to stop vermin. It very seldom is (Leckies love that easy to put in cables) Inside of chimneys not plastered. encourages build up of soot & keeps fire brigades employed. Lack of Damp proof courses. Look carefully and you can see slate dpc at foot of wall but on shonkier jobs only a strip about 1" wide instead of thru entire wall (very common) Newspaper backing to ornate cornices & ceiling pediments. The list goes on & on. Gees I miss working on old buildings  pitting my knowlwdge against a guy who has been dead for up to 500 years. Its a wonderful feeling when you find you have come to the same conclusion as the old guy and that he has had the same thought process. |
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Post by ozneil on Feb 3, 2011 7:16:12 GMT -1
My favourite Scottish conundrum was Tantallon castle.
In Civil War in 1640s. The Roundheads were beseiging Tantallon castle & set up a battery of 4 30lb siege guns behind a berm spread out in an arc about 200 yards long. The berm had stone lined embrasures angled in such a way that when the guns were pushed in they all fired at the same spot on the wall. The obvious way would be for the artillery officer to stand at point on wall & take back bearings but this would not be feasible as the defenders would probably take exception drop large chunks of stone on his head.
The berm & embrasures had to be done at night so that the defenders couldnt see them but by the same token they couldnt see where they were tagetting. It took me ages to work out how the 17th century gunner had done it. Lets say he knew trig well. Not bad for a 17th century common soldier
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Post by notanimby on Feb 3, 2011 7:17:30 GMT -1
Same everywhere Stonemasons here can demand anything. Funny thing is masons are generally Scottish & Italian. Westie there were enough shonks around in Victorian times, its not a modern phenomenon. On stuff I was working on in Glasgow common "faults" in Victorian buildings were Stone laid with grain vertical instead of horizintal (Bloody sight cheaper to buy & easier to work). This results in stone "spalling" as in Rolo's columns or even as seen in heading pic here. Water gets into layer freezes and expands so outer layer falls off. Creation of "mouse runs" On high skirtings there are 2 pieces of wood set horizontally to hold them in place. The space between them should be filled with plaster to stop vermin. It very seldom is (Leckies love that easy to put in cables) Inside of chimneys not plastered. encourages build up of soot & keeps fire brigades employed. Lack of Damp proof courses. Look carefully and you can see slate dpc at foot of wall but on shonkier jobs only a strip about 1" wide instead of thru entire wall (very common) Newspaper backing to ornate cornices & ceiling pediments. The list goes on & on. Gees I miss working on old buildings pitting my knowlwdge against a guy who has been dead for up to 500 years. Its a wonderful feeling when you find you have come to the same conclusion as the old guy and that he has had the same thought process. Oz is quite correct - you only have tp read "The Ragged Trouser Philanthropist" to read about cowboy builders/decorators way back then |
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Post by westender on Feb 3, 2011 12:57:31 GMT -1
I would venture to suggest that the Victorians did know what they were doing on account of the grandeur of their vision, visible everywhere in this city, and the fact that so much of it, anything up to 150+ years old, is still standing and still wind and watertight.
Built to last, as opposed to.... well, everything that's been flung up in recent times.
ozneil, in laymans terms please, what is this "spalling" you're talking about? I know that round the Uni, the bits that are flaking and falling off the buildings are all work of later "repairs". They're not the original fabric.
Much damage was done, I gather, back round about the time of the Garden Festival / City of Culture times in Glasgow. A lot of work was undertaken to clean up the Victoriam sandstone.... much of it, as we found out later, shoddily done - and certainly done on the cheap.
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Post by westender on Feb 3, 2011 13:00:59 GMT -1
<head in hands> tell me about it I only have my own recent experience to offer. Back in June/July, oh and August and into September.... we had stonework repairs done on the exterior of our building. I live in a Victorian terrace which has a columned entry porch shared with the house next door that was showing signs of wear and tear. Like bits falling off it ;D I was not convinced at the time by the quote nor the quality of the contractors but eventually caved in under the relentless pressure of a particularly bullish next door neighbour that this cheap quote was worth the money--- and I was outvoted by the other two neebs. The job was supposed to take four weeks. Sixteen weeks on, the scaff was still up and progress was slow and patchy, some days nobody was there, having been pulled off the job to go work on another. AND those that did the work were clearly colour blind, replacing the weathered blonde sandstone with what appears to be bright yellow icing. People don't seem to want to pay for artisans these days, preferring a quick patchup job. I will never make the same mistake again. There's some HA tenements round about where the boyf lives. Sometime around August last year, scaffolding went up, all the way to the top. Green and purple mesh went round the scaffolding, presumably to keep the dust in. Work was done on the roof. In August and September. Nothing's been done since then. The scaffolding is still up. The mesh is still there. The folk in that building must be going stark stairn bonkers with the lack of light! Why is it still there? What is wrong with folk?? |
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Post by ozneil on Feb 3, 2011 19:22:05 GMT -1
Westie the technical term for your flaking is "spalling". Cheaper sandstone is susceptible to it as its not so dense.
Sandstone is formed in layers over time which gives it a grain something like the grain of timber. The best way to lay it is with the grain running horizontally but this is harder to quarry and harder work though more durable & therefore dearer. The shonks bought a cheaper stone and got away with it, most people, including me, would be hard put to tell the difference.
When the stone was laid with the grain set vertically rainwater seeped into the joints and gradually saturated it . After years of freezing in winter the ice forced the stone to de-laminate & spall/flake. Another reason for the spalling was in the 1960s when you started cleaning up the city the contractors used sand blasting. While this was very effective the sand molecules blocked up the pores in the stone, including stone laid properly , so trapping the moisture & exasperating the spalling situation. They now use high pressure water to clean buildings & I believe fairy liquid
if the repairs are failing they werent done properly. Probably done to a budget & minimum done but why were repairs needed in first place.
BTW The older parts of Glasgow Uni should be ok as they are built with a less porous Giffnock Stone as is parts of our old Parliament house. (The stone was brought out here as ballast in the migrant ships)
Of course a lot of your, and ou,r Victorian Buildings survive. They are the best examples and beautifully designed & built with fantastic safety margins. But even in them if a worker could make a quid he would take a short cut. (Ya gorra watch em) After the Tay bridge disaster everyone became very safety conscious (Forth bridge has a safety margin of 7). The rotten Victorian buildings have long gone. In Glasgow all the Gorbals & Bridgeton were being demolished in my time.
The creamy coloured sand stone used in many Glasgow buildings is Giffnock stone while the reddish sandstone comes from the borders.
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Post by ozneil on Feb 3, 2011 20:33:54 GMT -1
As an adjunct to this thread.
When I worked in Park Circus my boss was a member of the board of the National Trust for Scotland and a real expert on old buildings (prob from him I got my love of old buildings).
The sandstone steps to the front of out office building over the front well were getting well worn so he in his infinite wisdom decided to turn them over (talk about Scots being tight) & they would last another 50 years.
They took out the first step & low & behold some tight old bugger had beaten them to it.......the other side was even more worn!!!
I thought how wonderfull it was that some things in this world never change .
I regret I dont know the outcome because at that time sanity returned & I came home
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Post by westender on Feb 4, 2011 15:30:42 GMT -1
Westie the technical term for your flaking is "spalling". Cheaper sandstone is susceptible to it as its not so dense. Sandstone is formed in layers over time which gives it a grain something like the grain of timber. The best way to lay it is with the grain running horizontally but this is harder to quarry and harder work though more durable & therefore dearer. I see what you mean, but I don't understand...stone is stone surely, how'dye mean it's 'harder to quarry'? <clueless> You dig out the stone from the quarry, you take it away and shape into the blocks you need - so it doesn't matter what comes out of the quarry....? </clueless> Ah, I see. Wouldn't it be nice to have thought that somebody somewhere would have done the research to find out the effects of the sandblasting process.... I would like to think that, what with much of the Uni being Grade A listed, the repairs would have to have been to highest spec possible... Indeed - and Pearce Lodge, at the bottom of Uni Avenue, was actually brought stone by stone to Gilmorehill from the site of the original University, on the High Street. There's a stone panel on one of the walls saying 1658. Indeed - and unfortunately these days, ya gorra watch out for extraneous arms/ feet/other bits & pieces fallin aff the statuary! Especially right now. (I'm waitin for rolo to come along any minute to have a moan about the Scottish weather over the past couple of days  ) - it's been seriously stormy here, with hurricane-force winds. That, coupled with the damage of the past couple of winters with heavy snow and ice - god knows what kind of state the extraneous, decorative bits of the buildings are in. The trouble was, in terms of those slums that were demolished in those parts of the city, there was nothing structurally wrong with those tenements - as opposed to the nightmare highrise deserts of Basil Spence and his ilk that were put up in their place. Most of what was flung up to replace the cleared slums have now in their turn been demolished as being absolutely no longer structurally fit for purpose, which wasn't the case with any Glasgow tenements. The buildings of the brave new world of the redevelopment of Glasgow didn't last even 50 years; most of them came nowhere near 50 years. Much housing that was flung up on the site of even the Glasgow Garden Festival is also now gone. If those so-called slum tenements of the east end had been cleaned up and proper sanitation installed, I reckon most of those buildings would still be standing, wind and watertight, today. How very like Glasgow, that the city's solution to the problem of the High Street Uni students being subjected to the noisome, foul and filthy slums increasingly encroaching on the ancient University.... was not to clean up the tenements and improve the area (and thereby retain the ancient and architecturally important Uni) - but to move the Uni...! and leave the slums to fester. Well I dunno about the blonde sandstone being Giffnock.... the old buildings of Gilmorehill are Giffnock sandstone - as is much of the interior of Kelvingrove - but that definitely can't be called "cream" coloured, or blond. |
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Post by westender on Feb 4, 2011 15:32:37 GMT -1
As an adjunct to this thread. When I worked in Park Circus my boss was a member of the board of the National Trust for Scotland and a real expert on old buildings (prob from him I got my love of old buildings). The sandstone steps to the front of out office building over the front well were getting well worn so he in his infinite wisdom decided to turn them over (talk about Scots being tight) & they would last another 50 years. They took out the first step & low & behold some tight old bugger had beaten them to it.......the other side was even more worn!!! I thought how wonderfull it was that some things in this world never change . I regret I dont know the outcome because at that time sanity returned & I came home LOL. I remember you telling that story before, mister! It's Scotland. What d'ye expect?! |
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Post by ozneil on Feb 4, 2011 20:10:58 GMT -1
ok here we go
the stone lies in beds. Usually the deeper it is the denser it is. The "grain" is horizintal due to pressure & gravity. Denser stone is hardef to cut.
The stone is brought out in big junks. In the old days cut round edges & split along bed (grain). It was easier to split along bed that to cut so less cutting more splitting the better therefore stone generally comes out in slabs rather than cubes
Now imagine a felled tree you are going to chop up for kindling . First you cut it into the longest practical lengths ... thats pretty hard cutting across grain work then you split it into small bits that easier & quicker working along the grain.
Same with building stone its generally approx 24" long x 12" high x 6" thick (Im working on memory here so dimensions are prob wrong but proportion is about right) it is easier to split the stone with the grain than cut across so split it into 6" slabs along grain its easier than having to saw it therefore cheaper. Easier now with power equipment & diamond blade saws
Sand Blasting
Noone knew it would bugger up the face of the stone at that time. As soon as they discovered that they stopped. A firm called Cameron used to do it
Shonky repairs
To do it proberly you have to cut out the whole stone.. that costs your first born. Cheaper cut out 2" deep & face it with matching stone .... costs an arm & a leg. Cheapest cut back and fill with expoxy & sand . If done properly its OK but costs to have it done properly. Unfortunately any shonk can buy a tube of "Aroldite and a bag of sand.
I have yet to meet a financial controller on a tight budget that will take the best option
Old tenements
A FEW were ok but most leaked were jerry built with sagging floors, leaking roofs, unstable walls due to poor foundations and spalling stone and damp as buggery.
Colour of Giffnock Stone
You will be right Im working on memory & heresay
High rise slums
That was a political decision made by your Council. I worked on Red Road & I can assure you they are structurally sound ( if they havent been knocked down) for the hell of a lot longer than 90 years
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2011 20:52:24 GMT -1
Old tenements A FEW were ok but most leaked were jerry built with sagging floors, leaking roofs, unstable walls due to poor foundations and spalling stone and damp as buggery. I'd concur with that, Oz, having lived in more than a few of them over the last 30 years. All in the West End, which of course has its own specific underground geography by way of subway and disused mainline tunnels and old coal minings. I particularly remember the student flat in Oakfield Avenue where you could see a foot of daylight out of the tat gable wall. That got strapped in the early 80s. Otago St though, my flat there you practically needed crampons going from front to back of the house. You could stick a marble at the door and it'd roll of its own volition to the window ;D One MOST memorable day, a heavy truck parked outside suddenly disappeared into a humungous hole that had just opened up. Once the thing had been craned out, millions of tonnes of liquid concrete were poured into the mine workings below. Many of the mines were not properly pit-propped; the coal would be mined leaving pillars made out of the coal itself. |
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Post by ozneil on Feb 4, 2011 21:09:38 GMT -1
Not only Glasgow Rolo.
When I first came down to Sydney a Yank from Kansas worked in the next office. He complained bitterly about his Australian desk. His pencils kept rolling off it.
We defended Australian craftmanship and told him it was the floor. We demonstrated by letting a golf ball roll across the floor. For some reason he didnt appear totally re assured.
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