We were puzzled to find when delving into our walls that the plaster and the brick were both jet black and sort of crumbly. I may have mentioned this in an early post (which was months ago, you can’t expect me to remember that) but on researching this I found it seems to be more or less unique to South Wales.
There was a big coal industry here, and it would appear the cheapest material for them to bulk out plaster (and whatever our interior walls are made out of, seems to be a sort of precursor to a breezeblock) was crushed up coal.
This stuff gets everywhere, is a nightmare to clean up and prompted us to quickly buy sealed respirators. Don’t fancy getting black lung from our walls.
We’ve since found the best thing to do once it gets exposed is to paint it with PVA glue. We bought a huge 5l tub of the stuff, and it also gets mixed into our mortar mixes that we now use to repair the walls.
We’ve had to build up the tops of walls to meet the ceiling so that we can then plaster or fill it flush with the rest of the wall, or to fill really deep gaps where filler just takes too long.
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