Hi, my wife and I are renovating an old 19th century house.
2 questions:
1) Having removed the old back-boiler/gas fire & associated brick-work from the chimney breast, we want to plaster around it all and will have a wood burner installed. Do we need to neutralise the soot that was left on the back of the old chimney breast even if we want to leave it plain?
2) we found an old chimney breast in the Kitchen that had been blocked up and vented. We've opened it up to it's original 1m height. We then decided that it'd make a great pantry/cupboard, so we installed 3 lintels, at about 6 foot height, to the full depth of the chimney breast and removed all the stone work beneath the new lintels. It's now about the size of a big doorway. We've repaired the areas that we had to pull stones from and it looks fantastic. We DO want to plaster & paint over the surface of the old stone work. We'll then fit and hang some cabinet doors on it all. The only problem is the area that the old chimney used to run has soot all up the back of the wall. I've heard that we need to neutralise the soot prior to plastering over it so that it's acidity doesn't do something we don't want it to do (still unsure of what this could be). I've read that SBR compound is the stuff for the job, but I thought that was adhesive. IS there a better option available?
More questions to come soon, I'm sure.
Thanks
xDK
2 questions:
1) Having removed the old back-boiler/gas fire & associated brick-work from the chimney breast, we want to plaster around it all and will have a wood burner installed. Do we need to neutralise the soot that was left on the back of the old chimney breast even if we want to leave it plain?
2) we found an old chimney breast in the Kitchen that had been blocked up and vented. We've opened it up to it's original 1m height. We then decided that it'd make a great pantry/cupboard, so we installed 3 lintels, at about 6 foot height, to the full depth of the chimney breast and removed all the stone work beneath the new lintels. It's now about the size of a big doorway. We've repaired the areas that we had to pull stones from and it looks fantastic. We DO want to plaster & paint over the surface of the old stone work. We'll then fit and hang some cabinet doors on it all. The only problem is the area that the old chimney used to run has soot all up the back of the wall. I've heard that we need to neutralise the soot prior to plastering over it so that it's acidity doesn't do something we don't want it to do (still unsure of what this could be). I've read that SBR compound is the stuff for the job, but I thought that was adhesive. IS there a better option available?
More questions to come soon, I'm sure.
Thanks
xDK
