I salvaged an old house down near the North Carolina border many years ago. The home was built in the late 1700’s and she had brick nogging in the walls between the timbers.
Nogging was often installed in this part of the country where clay was bountiful to make bricks in the sun. The bricks were of course all soft and would crumble easily, yes, because of their age, but mainly because they had not been kiln fired.
The nogging served as a crude form of insulation, but mainly as a weather sealer and heat mass. Certainly it beat having nothing at all in the walls. I can say that the look is stunning… jaw dropping… to this old boy.
But the centuries of contact between earth and wood had rotted every piece within this home.
One of my crewmembers stepped forward and adopted this house as an outbuilding on his property.
Originally posted 2015-04-01 15:15:15.