Behind the scenes of a refurbishment
Last Friday we had a site meeting at a 1930s property we are starting to refurbish and I want to share some of the construction details we found through the soft strip process because they are quite interesting.
The apartment is in a North London Art Deco building. One that was also home to Bill Brandt ,the photographer behind many of the black and white images of Londoners taking shelter inside the London Underground during the blitz.
Worth noting that before we started the soft strip, we were aware that the apartment has barely been touched for the past six decades. Just as many properties have, updates had been made in an ad hoc manner to address specific needs and it was therefore unlikely that the walls and floors concealed the kind of unfortunate surprises we have grown used to finding.
Furthermore, during the design stages and during the preparation stages we did a substantial amount of research and had identified the elements we were to stay away from (crittal stacks, for example) and those we had to deal with responsibly (asbestos tiles).
With all this said, i will now take you behind the scenes of a refurbishment and show you the interesting findings (interesting to us, at least) :
Like many buildings of this period, the slabs are made out of concrete and span between concrete beams. The flooring that sits on the top of is composed of a single layer of battens topped up with floor boards.
All this is quite typical and although there are variations (i.e. the use of beam and clay blocks instead of concrete slabs or a double batten arrangement instead of single) we did not expect to find the following:
The battens were nailed down to the slab and, one would assume, that because timber expands and contracts, each batten had then been propped by a cementitious mix in both sides keeping them in place.
Then a detail i had not previously come across in buildings of this period:
The use of a felt on the top of the battens to, one would assume, absorb movement and transmission of noise. This is a detail that i have used in modern buildings (in the opposite direction) to prevent noise transfer, but this was a surprise.
Another fascinating thing we found is that for each pendant (located by the windows ) three conduits had been run above the slab/ party floor of each apartment, concealed in multiple metal casings .
Aside from the number of conduits, it was interesting to see that rather than embedded in the slab as it is often the case, the multiple metal ducts run under the floorboards of the neighbours living upstairs.
This, of course, tells us that there was a single ownership when the building was built and therefore access to the ducts was not seen as an issue. Nowadays, however, there are some implications.
For example, the need to ensure any penetrations are fire sealed, but also, some of those conduits are difficult to make sense of and therefore cannot be rationalised or considered obsolete when planning our own heating pipes.
Finally, this particular home has partitions made out of clay blocks rather than concrete blocks
While soft stripping we found those have been often chased and cut out to make room to all sorts of built in fixtures. From wall cabinets to cables or switches and sockets , and we (the team) will need to keep and eye and address as needed.