Stone cladding
The 70s and 80s have a lot to answer for, particularly in the way people apparently thought it was a good idea to cover the front of their houses in concrete blocks or ‘stone cladding’ which sounds way nicer than it looks when applied as was on the front of our house. So much so that when advertised on Rightmove.. there was no picture of the front, not that it was later tucked towards the back, there just wasn’t one. I mean what’s not to love about randomly spaced yellow blocks interspersed with blue and red.
Seems an odd thing to attach heavy solid concrete panels to the front of a house where the brickwork was designed to breathe and I wouldn’t be surprised if many a house with such decoration had problems with damp inside.
Removal
One of the first things we did during the renovation was to get rid of it. So apparently this can be easy or notoriously difficult and it’s impossible to tell how much the underlying bricks have been damaged beforehand. This depends on the quality of the initial work. Turns out ours was badly applied and some of the blocks needed some encouragement but many just practically fell off (which was concerning in its own right!) given the number of people who would pass under them.
We removed them using a hammer and chisel for the most part and they came away easily except a few. You could see where glue had been applied to the centre of each block as it left a mark but we were going to have them blasted back to original yellow brick so as long as not too much of the brick frontage came away, this was ok.
The main concern was whether the blocks were applied to hide anything significant such as a movement crack, but luckily it appears they were purely for aesthetics or fashion (if you can call it that).
Lessons learned
- Removing the cladding will always be an unknown risk until you start the job and may need rendering over if the blocks were well applied the first time
- You can quickly tell how easily they are going to come away and decide whether to proceed from there
- Would we do it again? Yes but with a back up plan for rendering in case the brickwork could not be salvaged
