Honest products – but honestly declared?
Here we want to give you an overview: on the one hand of our product philosophy, and on the other of the problems, pitfalls and illusions in the big world of building materials.
Our main concern is to sell only sensible, good, high-quality building materials at Lehm-Laden that we can vouch for with regard to health. But what does „good“ mean? Quite simply: for us, building materials are good if we ourselves would use them with pleasure and without any risks when building our own four walls – in short: what we can take responsibility for in terms of material quality, ethics and health. And this responsibility has a lot to do with honesty and fairness.
Information withheld
From here, from the vantage point of honesty and fairness, it is worth looking in the opposite direction. All too often, customers are misled and receive something other than what they expected. A simple example is lime plaster – or so-called lime plaster, which in some cases is not a lime product at all but, to put it bluntly, merely a cement product containing some lime. In any case, most of the DIY-store goods declared as lime plaster contain cement. Where's the disadvantage, doesn't it make no difference, it's nice and hard after all, and anyway it all depends on what you make of it?, you might say now. Unfortunately, though, it does make a difference, and there are disadvantages: unlike lime, cement is not as vapour-permeable. With a cement-containing plaster you seal your building in such a way that moisture can diffuse from the inside to the outside considerably less well. Some types of plaster require strength classes that can simply only be achieved by adding cement.
Finding out whether a plaster contains cement or not requires a sound knowledge of product properties that is not normally part of the average Joe's repertoire. Only the small print in the product data sheet declares the ingredients – and without deeper knowledge, terms such as „mortar group“, „binder“, „strength class“ or „aggregate“ are just empty words. Providing this information in plain language should therefore clearly be the job of the manufacturers, in this case the lime and cement works. Since such a declaration is not normally made, we consider this a deception of the customer – not to mention the fact that no manufacturer of cement-based products makes any effort to explain to their customers how damaging a cement plaster can be for a house.
Transparent and (vapour-)permeable
For this reason, namely for the sake of transparency – and not least of diffusion – you will only find properly and honestly declared building materials at Lehm-Laden that are sound in terms of building physics and building biology and that we stand behind completely: products whose composition is pure or at least clearly stated in their description. On top of that, you will always find an alternative. We do not offer just a single product for a specific application, but a certain selection within a product group, so that you are not obliged to buy that one particular item.
Of course, as always in real life, compromises also arise in the building process. Just imagine you have finally found and bought the beautiful historic house of your dreams. There you encounter not only the peculiarities of the old, original building fabric, but also those of the last few decades, during which many well-intentioned measures took a heavy toll on houses and made things worse rather than better. You come across substrates that are not ideal but, for whatever reason, cannot be removed. And for exactly your case there is a primer, but unfortunately it contains dispersion. Simply because no other primer works on this particular substrate. (Believe us: it is not as if nobody had tried to do it differently, i.e. without dispersions. In building with natural materials, such a solution is only ever recommended when the use of pure, additive-free building materials would not achieve the desired result.)
Carefully declared
At Lehm-Laden, every product that does not clearly consist of organic or mineral ingredients is declared accordingly. In addition, we always try to offer an alternative made from natural raw materials (and explain the advantages and disadvantages of each option).Ready for another example, which you will also find in the Lehm-Laden product range? Gladly: reinforcing mesh. It is commonly called glass-fibre mesh. Unfortunately, this is misleading: in fact, it consists of thin, coarsely woven glass filaments which, however, are reinforced with a plastic-containing finish to such an extent that it ought really to be called plastic mesh.
The list could go on for a long time, especially with conventional, crudely declared building materials.
Instead, here are a few general words about our suppliers: when selecting suppliers, we require at least a basic understanding of natural building materials. Some manufacturers, for example those of construction machinery, who normally have nothing to do with building with natural materials, sometimes make it difficult for us to reconcile our two company philosophies. But sometimes dialogue alone with such manufacturers can achieve results: only recently we managed to persuade a machinery manufacturer to use a filling material made from renewable raw materials instead of the usual plastic chips to protect the goods in transit. At least the parcels that reach Lehm-Laden are now packed with the alternative filling material – and we hope that the manufacturer now does the same for all its customers.
