Hallo everyone, it’s my first post here! Hope you can give me some advice.
A bit of a background: me and my partner purchased a very old and charming stone house (probably something like 400yo) in the north of France two years ago. We took our time to get the feel of the house as it is in shape good enough to stay here during weekends and holidays. Now we are slowly thinking about renovations and we decided to start up with the bathroom. We want to do most of things ourselves as we are stil young and rather handy although we have very little experience with renovation and we have a small budget. But we have time.
We will ask the plumber to upgrade our water pipes and we would like to replace a bath with the shower, the rest can stay as it is. I ve already took off the gluey paint that was on the walls and opened the beam. The old plaster looks rather fine except some cracks here and there. But the room is very cold in the winter as it is far away from the wood stove and there is nothing but the ground under the floor tiles.
So now I wonder:
should we just get water pipes replaced (I don’t mind them being visible) and shower installed, fill up the gaps and cracks with plaster, paint over the tiles and just make it look nice?
Or should we better strip everything down to the stone, take off the tiles, insulate exterior walls and redo everything?
The house is rather rough so I really don’t need this modern clean look bathroom but rather something that suits with the rest of the house.
I’m looking forward to hear any suggestions!
Personally I’d have both of you come to the house and spend a few days on the coldest, wettest, windiest days of the year (priorities in the order I have listed them highest to lowest in choosing days). Mid-January perhaps. Christmas-New Year might be close enough in weather awfulness.
After a few days your own priorities for every room in the house, in particular bathroom, will become clear to you.
It needs both of you because often one member of a couple is far more sensitive to cold, or draughts, than the other.
Hi Agata and welcome to SF. If it were me, I’d rip everything out and start again. Regarding insulation, always a good idea, but especially in a bathroom even if its just insulated plasterboard glued to the non-wet walls. Floor insulation is a bit trickier as it needs some depth, but even 10mm helps and can be tiled over. Other considerations should be ventilation to prevent condensation build up and some form of heating, even if its just a heated towel rail.
Where abouts in Northern France are you?
Concurr. Rip it all out and start again to the current normes and your comfort and practicality. Damp is the biggest problem in bathrooms so your ventilation and heating needs to be the priority. If its a lock up and go property, then you want simple and easy to clean. A house that old probably has no reinforced concrete floor or deep foundations so that is one of the first things to sort and then work off that because at the same time you can add or remove plumbing pipes and fittings to elsewhere depending on the drainage system outside. Might also be a good idea to have the metal grille fitted to the window to keep would be intruders out like most french houses with downstairs bathrooms (and someupstairs) have.
Hi. I concur with the advice to visit at the worst time(s) of year then decide priorities. Ours then turned out to be 1) a 12 kw woodburner (heats the whole house from cold and empty in about 3 hours in mid winter when it’s often minus centigrade & 2) internal wall insulation on all external walls, plus ceilings so on visiting there is a quick heat build up. For bathrooms you will get much less condensation if you use absorptive materials such as lime render or insulated lime render mixes (including hemp shivs) and these can even be slapped on to rough surfaces with gloved hands and smoothed by hand
Bathrooms need 3 things — warmth, insulation, and ventilation.
Calculate the heating capacity needed according to the cubic volume of the room, and then fit heating capable of delivering double that amount. You don’t have to use it full blast all the time, but it is there as and when you need it. The climate is changing, so be prepared.
Insulating the outside walls is essential unless you want streams of condensation running down them every time you take a shower in winter. Much better to prevent the condensation from forming in the first place than to have to constantly battle the black mold that it will cause.
Last but by no means least, fit adequate ventilation direct to the outside. I have found that a PIR movement detector coupled to an extractor fan that has a timer works really well. Every time someone enters the room the fan will come on, and then continue to run for a time after they vacate the room which is particularly useful if the bathroom also contains a toilet.
If you do all these things you will have a comfortably warm room in which to take a shower, have no need to clean away black mold, and have no persistent dampness or unpleasant odours.
It will take a bit of planning but will be well worth the effort.
Thanks everybody for advice!
Our place is located in Ardennes (083) in area of Givet. We stayed there the last two years between Christmas and NYE so we have a good idea how cold and wet can it get.
I see a lot of you mention good breathability of walls. I was wondering what paint should be used in bathrooms of stone houses? If it’s typical waterproof bathroom paint then the wall can’t breath properly, right? Any other suggestions?
Unfortunately we need to postpone our bathroom renovations and focus on other priorities.
A friend of a friend who is retired macon visited the other day and said that before we start any big works we should do something about the structure of the house.
We are going to look for a structure engineer to give us advice. Any recommendations?
The age of the house @Agata_Kontra is a crucial question. I suspect our house would be viewed with concern by some - 50cm thick walls straight down onto clay on top of sandstone (no foundations). So there is movement all the time and cracks appear as the building copes with the expansion and contraction of the clay depending on how much rain we’ve had and the level of the water table.
Our house is over 350 years old, so we’re pretty relaxed about its state - we think it should see us out.
That’s how we feel about ours - also no foundations, very thick walls, built on a slope etc etc. It it’s lasted a few hundred years, it’s likely to continue
Ours might be standing there for more than 400 years, btw where can you check that?
There is a house on the street with 1610 graved on the stone while the house across the street 1580. I guess we might be somewhere in between assuming from the style.
There are quite a few big cracks in the walls and the macon said that currently our roof holds the whole house.
When we bought the house 2 years ago via notarie there was a paper confirming a visit of the structure engineer and confirming that it is safe, but I don’t know how reliable these pre-sale check-ups are.
In our case the info was in the purchase papers and subsequently I was able to verify it on the Cassini map of 1783 (so it’s at least 240 years old) - our house is shown. We are fortunate in that we live in the country and the maps show individual properties, often with their lieu-dit name.
If you want to see the most amazing collection of Cassini maps in beautiful clarity go to the David Rumsey website (see this example)
