UKC

We're planning to get our creaky old up-and-over garage door, which jams on the garage floor and has a semi-rotten wooden frame, replaced with a nice electric roller door. The new door will fit behind the opening, which will leave bare brickwork around the inside of the doorway. The exterior of the garage is rendered and harled. We were planning to get the bare brickwork rendered within a day or so of the new door going in. Now the door installer is offering to get the job done three weeks sooner than originally planned but, due to holidays, we definitely won't be able to bring the rendering job forward as well.

I'm just wondering whether leaving the brickwork bare for a few weeks is likely to have any bad consequences. Bear mind that (a) it's summer, so even here in Scotland the weather should be relatively benign, and (b) the garage is constructed from the toughest bricks I've ever encountered (and I have a collection of knackered masonry drills to prove it!)

Any opinions? (And before anyone suggests it, no, I'm not going to do the rendering myself. Past experience has shown that I am not to be trusted with a trowel in combination with anything that starts off as a powder and gets mixed with water. ANd anyway, I'm going on holiday.)

In reply to Martin W:
I imagine that three weeks (ish) of the worst Scottish weather wouldn't do anything to exposed brick work or effect it being rendered?

The only problem I could see would be if the temperature drops down to freezing and water gets trapped between the render and the brick, which would allow for expansion and eventually blow the render off. Bare brick will not be a problem as most houses are left as brick.

In reply to gordo:


Yes, I think think potential damage to the surrounding render due to water ingress through the exposed edge is my main concern. I'm not expecting freezing temperatures any time in the next few weeks but rain, and possibly quite a lot of it, is fairly likely. Could water penetrating the existing render through a "raw" edge cause it to degrade?

Maybe we could just paint the edge of the existing render to make it bit more weatherproof.

In reply to Martin W:

No need to do that, the render is cementatious and can stand saturation.

If you paint it, you'll make it harder for the new render to stick.

The first thing the plasterer will do is paint it all with PVA and wet it all down anyway

In reply to Martin W:

My whole house is bare brick. 80 years of exposure to English weather hasn't done it much harm. Is Scotland really that bad?!

jk

In reply to Martin W:

I would take the risk, painting will make it difficult for the Render to stick and pva won't work as it is used for internal works rather than external.

Thanks for all the input, and the reassurance. We've given the go-ahead for the new door to be installed this weekend (much to the delight of our neighbours, I'm sure, as they will no longer have to endure its anguished squeals and creaks every time I exercise its decrepit mechanism) and I'll leave the exposed inside of the door opening as-is until our local trowel tradesman has fully recovered from his recent heart attack (seriously, poor fellow).