And the answer is: "who knows?"
When we viewed St Abbs although it was obvious this tree would have to come down, the wall situation didn't even register in our minds. It simply didn't occur to us that the damp problems in the bathroom extension were being caused by the boundary wall. For some reason, someone decided that it would be a jolly good idea to infill the little gap between said wall and St Abbs' bathroom wall....then render over it front, back and top!
As I've mentioned before we live on a hill, so our neighbours' garden is higher than our's and this means that water easily filters through the granite boundary wall. Of course, this isn't a problem in the garden border but the bathroom extension was built (back in the 1940s, we think) extremely close to the wall.
The only solution was to completely remove the boundary wall along the bathroom extension. OMG, there were some humungous lumps of granite along there! Vernon and Mark did the bulk of the moving ~ by hand, I might add! There were still some pieces very close to the bathroom wall, which George had to loosen with a jack-hammer (I think that's what it was called, anyway LOL). This left a nice clear area but the wall was a bit dodgy, so George built a block retaining wall, tying in to the original bathroom wall, which firmed everything up beautifully.
As usual, I was a tad remiss with the photo-taking record, but you get the general idea of what had to be done. The photo above is taken from the rear of St Abbs.
The guys laid a concrete pad from the boundary to the new block wall, with a slight slope from back to front. Water should now run down into the front garden.
George rendered the block wall and topped it with lead flashing. He also built a new section of boundary wall, again from concrete blocks, and Chris topped it off with pieces of the granite which had been removed just to help it blend in along the top.
When the guys were digging out along the bathroom wall they found a crisp packet.....from 1968!
It's actually rather disturbing to see how relatively little deterioration there has been in over 50 years. These plastics hang about for a very long time.
On a more cheerful note, though, Adrian bought me this gorgeous bunch of flowers a couple of months back 😊
I was absolutely enthralled by the ornamental cabbage ~ isn't it just the most beautiful "flower"!
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