Victorian terrace window repair
Have you ever commissioned a tradesman to repair something and it ends up worse than when they started? This happened to a delightful couple in Cormont Road, Camberwell; a fascinating purpose-built square of Victorian subtly-differing terraced houses. The stonework on the ground-floor bay had eroded and a cowboy builder had replaced the lower string with concrete paving slabs (!) and rendered over the moulding (see below).
Rendering over stone with a sand/cement mix is a temporary fix at best, due to the different thermal expansions of the materials. This had only been done 5 years previously. Luckily, David, the owner, had photos prior to this:
From this I was able to work out the original mouldings. I ordered the stone and worked the individual stones to shape in my workshop, then after dismantling the stonework and 2 courses of bricks, we rebuilt the whole. This is near the end where we’ve installed the lower string course, laid the 2 brick courses and have pointed up the pediment. (That’s a ‘phonemason’, by the way…)
And this is the painted final.
