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Long Gallery Ceiling Repairs Near Completion
By Sharon S. Kessler and Karen Meacham The plaster repair and work to stabilize the Long Gallery ceiling should be complete by month’s end, a Harlaxton College official said Tuesday. And by June, the clouds drifting on a robin’s-egg blue sky will once again grace the gallery’s ceiling. “We’re slightly ahead of schedule,” said Ian Welsh, the college’s business manager, who is overseeing the project. “We’re now at the stage where the lath is on and the first coat of plaster is on.” There are two more coats of plaster to follow, with the next one on Monday. “Then about a 10-day wait and then the final coat of plaster will go on, and then they’ll be finished,” he said. It will take weeks for the plaster to dry completely before it can be painted and return to its lazy-day beauty sometime in June, he said. In all, plaster specialists are replacing 25-30 percent of the ceiling, Welsh said. That is the area the scaffolding has hidden this semester. Above it, workers stripped off a large swath of unstable plaster and replaced the lath and are now in the process of layering on the plaster again. The work more visible involves stabilizing other parts of the ceiling by drilling holes into the plaster and securing bolts and washers to the underlying beams, which has left the ceiling temporarily pockmarked with recessed bolts. It’s a tidy ending to what Welsh describes as the “right mess” that Harlaxton Manor staff discovered on the morning of Dec. 7: an irregular-shaped section of the ceiling measuring roughly 10-feet by 20-feet had simply fallen down overnight. On the spot where students had sat for their British Studies final a couple days before, there was shattered plaster, a pile of dust and many questions. “It came down in pieces, and if it hit someone on the head, I suppose it could have killed them,” Welsh said. “It could have been quite nasty, and there would have been several people under it as well. So we were very lucky in that sense.”
Lucky, too, the college’s architect was scheduled to visit to consult on another project. He surveyed the damage and offered some advice and suggested a local contractor. Beyond the mess, there were other concerns, including a wedding scheduled for the Long Gallery the following day and two more events scheduled for early the next week. “We’re used to things going wrong,” Welsh said. “You have to be, in a building like this. Our immediate concerns were, `We’ve got a wedding tomorrow, and they’re coming in today.' Our second concern was what are we going to do for the beginning of the semester (in January) and then, really, how do we achieve it? And then you just get on with it.” Even before a contractor was called, Harlaxton staff members put up a scaffold at the end of the room where the plaster had fallen – to catch any more falling debris, to keep people away from the area and to create a work space to evaluate why the ceiling had fallen. “It wasn’t in a part of the ceiling that had water damage in the past," Welsh said. "So it had come down for no apparent reason, which is always worrying.” Harlaxton staff did an initial survey of the ceiling and identified another area that looked weak. That section was shored up with a couple of long strips of plywood that were bolted to the joists above and then quickly painted to match the sky motif. Then with a little reshuffling of plans and rooms, and with the scaffold in place, some masking draperies and carefully placed tables, the looming events went on as planned. Then the college had another stroke of luck, Welsh said. The foremost experts in heritage plastering, Skillington Workshop of Grantham, came to take a look at the problem. “Contractors like that often have a very long lead time, but we were lucky that they were in Grantham and they could fit us in,” he said. And it didn’t take their experts long to determine why the ceiling let go. “They cut corners,” said Philip Gaches of Skillington Workshop, referring to the plasterers who put up the ceiling more than 150 years ago. “And here, one of the things they cut corners with was they didn’t put enough hair in – animal hair,” he said. Hair? In the plaster? Indeed. “This is bovine, probably cow,” he said of the hair in the fallen plaster. “That generally is what was used, and they didn’t put enough in.”
Gaches explained that in the old way of plastering a ceiling, the animal hair is mixed in the other ingredients in the mortar, which is then pressed into the half-inch gap between the laths in the ceiling. “When you push it up between the laths, it squeezes through the gaps and folds over and helps it hold the ceiling up,” he said. And the right amount of animal hair has a lot to do with a ceiling’s staying power, he said. The hair in the plaster entangles and helps it stick to itself as it oozes around the lath. Gaches’ theory is that over the years, the normal expanding and contracting of the plaster in summer’s heat and winter’s cold caused some cracks to develop in the Long Gallery ceiling. Those cracks loosened the plaster, and it gradually came completely loose from the laths. More animal hair in the mix might have helped it hang on a bit better, he said. “But having said that, the ceiling stood for 150 years. … Maybe we should consider that a success.” On the other hand, he said, Jacobean ceilings put up 400 years ago are still perfectly OK, “because Jacobean plasterers put lots and lots of hair in.” Gaches and his colleagues have worked on ceilings at historic buildings including No. 10 Downing Street, the House of Lords, Belvoir Castle, Stoke Rochford Hall and a decorative ceiling in a garden building commissioned by the Royal Warrant Office as a wedding gift for Prince Charles and Camilla, the duchess of Cornwall. This week at Harlaxton Manor, while they waited for the first layer of plaster to dry, the Skillington crew carefully drilled holes and bolted other areas of the ceiling to the underlying beams in a process they called “stitching the ceiling back together.” The goal is to maintain the historical integrity of the manor by replacing as little of the ceiling as possible, while making it as safe as possible. It’s a task the college administrators take very seriously.
The Harlaxton staff took this opportunity to also examine all the ceilings in the formal rooms of the manor, Welsh said. “Only the Long Gallery seems to have had that problem, and the report from the plasterer shows previous repairs in the '50s and major cracks that had stabilized, probably in the 1930s, but none of the others (ceilings) are showing any signs of coming down.” In another stroke of luck, the damage only affected the flat plaster part of the Long Gallery ceiling. The decorative plasterwork around the edges went unscathed. And as these projects go, this repair job is relatively easy, Gaches said. When complete, the project will have cost about £15,000 or $30,000, Welsh said. “It’s off-budget but well within the surplus we are going to generate this year,” he said. “And $30,000 is a drop in the ocean to be honest with you. We’d prefer not to spend it, but it’s not drastic.” The next challenge is that once this work ends, the ceiling will be full of grey splotches of drying plaster. The staff is concerned about how this would look during upcoming events in the Long Gallery, so they're seeking a "breathable" paint or covering to mask the plaster until the painters can return it to its heavenly glory. |
"A right mess," is how Ian Welsh
describes what Harlaxton staff members found in the Long Gallery on Dec. 7, when a large section of plaster had fallen from the ceiling overnight.
Martin Clark, of Skillington
Workshop, recently replaced lath above the Long Gallery ceiling as part of the
repair project. When plaster is pushed into the half-inch gap between the laths,
it oozes behind and around them and adheres to itself, holding the ceiling up.
The Long Gallery ceiling is
pockmarked with holes where bolts and washers have been attached to the beams
above to add support for the ceiling. The holes will soon be filled with
plaster.
Michael Stokes, of Skillington
Workshop, showed a bundle of animal hair that is used in the plaster.