Cracking The Damp Treatment Code ~ £10k Saving!

foreign the first stop on our West Country tour is mine head and it's just stopped raining and we're going to go and see Rosalind now Rosalind has just bought this house and she's got a few problems with them welcome come on in hello how are you thank you for coming along cheers Roger nice to meet you I was told of a pretty bad damp problem that implied potentially tanking the whole of the house and sort of even ripping out the staircase to tank and I was sort of like oh my God what about what have I bought help as part of buying this house you had a survey I had a survey said maybe a bit of damp get some specialists in exactly so you've got the specialist in yeah and they came in they're a dent proof company yeah yes dampen Timber they initially um suggested um injecting a chemical diet so when they came in they found them yes they did use the little meter or something yeah so they came in and they said right the whole place is damp so what we want to do is we want to heck off all the plaster all the way around up to the magic meter 1.2 meters yeah one point soon now he's going up right you know it's going up it used to be three feet no it's a mid how long is this been unoccupied not that long actually um since the 30th of March to be precise they moved out when we completed and I've turned the heating on and off since because you know to keep it just to keep a little bit going in it and obviously you've opened the windows so I have to air invent it yeah which is quite honestly you're doing all the right things here the walls are like 45 centimeters thick solid Somerset Stone I mean certainly it doesn't smell damp it doesn't look damp that's exactly what I thought it has been recently decorated exactly I wouldn't say this is that old just decoration now okay they're selling it maybe they just did it to sell it you know and so on but you know sometimes you when people use things like vinyl paints on a wall uh if it's damp it'll stop blistering and so on so this isn't blistering at the moment it feels like it's been perhaps ready to be recently plastered I don't know do you know what there's a there's a partition there isn't there yeah I think I think you're spot on I think it's actually somebody's already done this which of course makes me worry a bit that we're seeing new plaster that maybe in a year is going to blister so this is the kitchen Diner area or was yeah oh so you're taking the kitchen out welcome to my kitchen well that's a good start I had to pull it out because actually the carcasses of the kitchen units were all rotten I was told by The Damp and Timber inspection company that this room well the whole house they referred to was gonna need to be tanked I'm having the boiler removed actually and popped up into the bathroom yeah um which will clear the space for hopefully a beautiful kitchen this is a great bit of guesswork by the way look doesn't it the kitchen's been out for days so it's only just getting a chance to to breathe I mean it is damp you can smell the them but it's not crazy amount of them I've pulled out many sinks in my life and this is the kind of thing you find behind yeah right lots of them it's not that alarming I mean it could definitely do with tidying up first but definitely do with some plaster but what I think I would recommend on here is just to use a renovating plaster I wouldn't bother to use a waterproof render on it because all you're doing is you you've got to render on the outside you've got a render on the inside if there's any damp in the wall it's just locking it all in there it's not to my mind that significant the tanking idea is it's all very well but all you get then is you get a cold surface and then you get conversation on it and then you think oh it hasn't cured the problem there's some nice renovating plasters which are just basically perlite lime in them there's a temporary buildup of moisture in the room exactly rather than it just condensing on a hard cold surface that plaster will absorb some of the moisture and then let it out again so it's almost like a buffer how much were you quoted by the way it would reached about ten thousand plus did it tanking the whole of the um exterior walls of the house and um installing humidistat ventilators or extractors okay yeah um in the kitchen in the bathroom and also sub floor because it's a suspended Timber floor and they were suggesting putting one of these humidistat extractors on of fans under the floor damp proof companies are demonized they do do a good job in the right situation to do a good job the problem is that when you get a survey around he's a Salesman he's only getting paid if he's getting work for the company in many respects you need independent people who have got no invested interest just want to tell you how it is yeah and in this case I would say save is ten thousand quid because even if you've got a guarantee and you're talking about reselling the property you get a guarantee on it you know let's say guaranteed 25 years or whatever a couple of years down the line you say it's a bit of damp you call them back in and they say to you I can guarantee this they say to you it's condensation your problem is not rising down it's conversation but they didn't say that originally they said it's a rising event problem and then it changes the conversation problem I would say it's more of a condensation problem than a rising that problem Rising damp does Exist by the way but it's not as common as people think and it is used to extract large amounts of money people like yourself so I think you did the right thing to just hesitate get some more opinions where I'm very worried about is this um rear elevation I've learned the terminology we're lucky that it's rained because if I'd come here last summer when we'd had all that hot weather it would have been very difficult exactly to work out anything clearly where all the spoilers run off here and has got nowhere to go that is absolutely soaking wet I think it would be possible and quite cheap just put a little bit of echo drain which is the one with the little slots in it in there just cut along there into that drain there this is taking the bath water and the roof water dropping down onto a bit of concrete and a little bit of tidying up around this drain Echo drain going through here put a decent shoe on this pipe here so that it actually goes into the drain rather than spilling over the edge so now let's go and have a look at the neighbors rainwater pipe Through the Jungle that is an old pipe baby Bellamy do you remember David Bellamy sorry I don't know what that was so it is very wet here and as well as he said the next door neighbors have had problems with them they've had to lower their ground to get some air underneath the floor I guess and we're concerned about this is a massive roof here coming down into this rainwater pipe so I really want to find out where that pipe is going to because if we can stop some of this water everybody's drains are coming into here yeah yeah the pipe you said so I put four of these down there and hardly any of it came out that suggests as some kind of break or blockage in there maybe roots from you know previous vegetation everything here is in pots so we shouldn't have too much going down in there but who knows what was underneath this but that's that looks like it's been there a good long time I'm talking 100 years at least that that cast iron pipe and it's stuffed into the top there's no way of accessing it there's no way of clearing it if you can get a drain plug put in there fill it up and see if it leaks out you know it should fill up to the top of the pipe and then you pull the plug out and then see what comes out I reckon it's escaping I reckon that half the problem is that it's taking all that water off that roof and it's going nowhere yes it's not getting into the drain now again because it's quite shallow that suggested me that that's a new restrain that somebody's playing around with that not that long ago you know I'm trying to say not that longer last 50 years or whatever maybe but somebody's done some work there but it doesn't mean that it's not broken or blocked or causing problems you know it's going somewhere it's definitely we you know the old law of physics isn't it you would expect if you put four of those in you would get four out you know so we've just had a trickle so given that this is a drain that's coming from somebody else's building yeah and under my garden am I responsible for repairing I'm blocking repairing or whatever it is required you make a very good point you've also got the neighbor there coming into this train and we're talking about foul water and rainwater the whole lot is coming into one which they don't do so much anymore but that means given the age of the property that it's a public sewer right it's adopted by the local Water Authority whoever that is that would be your first Port of Call right and it's good news for you because it means that if there is any digging up to be done here they'll dig it all up repair it and uh and even reinstate all the slabs inside okay so that's definitely one that you need to say you've had somebody around I suspect there's leaks in the drains and they're causing damage to your property say that because yeah yeah we I'm not being alarmist here in some cases it washes away the foundations and causes some silence it's not happening here but what I'm saying is they would be aware of that that if they you tell them it's suspect damage to your property they've got to act they've got to act fairly quickly rather than just so it's them so if they test this lot and they find that it's a bit of a leak uh or that you know there's there's some blockage or whatever they will clear it sometimes they realign it sometimes they don't take up the drain they just put a new liner through so this is my utility room yeah and you wouldn't believe it but it is yeah so you want to put that lube back in yeah I don't think that assistant was yeah I don't think that's horrendous I think that um obviously somebody used it for a washing machine or whatever yes the washing machine was here and I want to put a washing machine here and if I can fit a little shower here it would save the problem of having just one family bathroom because now because everybody wants yeah yeah more than one bathroom or the very least a cloak room well actually what you could do really nicely was just make this into a wet room yeah tile the floor put a drain in the floor that needs to be dug out but I'm pretty sure you can get a connection back into there nice little shower in the corner you've got the hot and cold running in I was told to tank this room because it's just a what they call a single skin is that right there the thing is what's that going to do the the tanking isn't the thing like you say it's one brick thick so you're thinking okay damp you know uh but the other thing is that the heat loss isn't it I think the best thing to use is an insulating board on it we use something called elements board which is a shower there's a board made for showers yeah yes it's got insulation in it you just stick it onto the wall with the tilities of cement-based tile adhesive then you can tile over it or do whatever you want but basically what that will give you is a waterproof layer a little bit of insulation you won't get a huge amount but it'll certainly help and it will take care of all that anything that's going on behind it can just carry on going on behind yes you can just breathe outwards well that's what I'm thinking it can escape so so we don't want to do too much of that now I just looked out there yeah that's a brick wall so that's not original somebody's done that at some point yes and this one here this is intriguing because what they've done here it looks quite nice but it is a very sticky sounding stuff it's not like a normal render is it it's a that's not it's a bit odd that's not a sound of cement that somebody's put some kind of plastic coating on the wall there and again you will say okay that could be trapping in moisture I wouldn't worry about it actually I'd leave it because it is shed in the rain no here's another thing right so there's no gutter here is that water running off that roof straight down there into the ground you know maybe when you do that work in there get the little manhole in here and um run that into it but yeah so that's not helping that's definitely not helping that that wet water but again I wouldn't bother tanking because I think once you get rid of that you can have a fairly dry room and if this is going to be a shower you want to put an extractor fan in there the one thing that you did mention in that survey that they talked about putting fans in with humidistats yes and I think that's a good idea anyway generally in a house you know if the moisture level rises fans kick in clear the moisture out yeah there's um the airbrake under the floor isn't it you're just about all right yes it's under the floorboards right yeah they need a bit of poking and stuff yeah I was thinking that I was wondering whether maybe chop it out put in a new grade another one which is slightly more airflow yeah so the render here you can see Somerset Sandstone it's all pretty solid isn't it yeah you can sort of hear the hollow sound I've been told various things actually I've been told to patch up but that is a sort of halfway house because you're putting sort of good with bad and then it may just not do the job I've been told to perhaps render up to the windowsill level because from the windowsill yeah it might be okay Beyond and I've also been taught the World by the time you're at the window so you might as well do the whole lot I would suggest patching it I would suggest this bit here you could put some new render on it just cut it you know with an angle grinder so I just get a decent line replace that bit and if in the future you get rich and you've got a bit of spare money then you can think about tackling the whole lot and again you can hack off the bad bits and Pat them up and what I just said about them not matching then go over the whole lot all of it with that they do a coating now to cover over Pebble Dash that just gives you a smooth finish so you would end up with not a pebble Dash front which wouldn't match your neighbors but just the plain render front which might look alright but yes you could do that or yeah you could bite the bullet and just hack the whole lot off I mean quite honestly they hack this lot off in a day so it's not horrendous and then go for one of the bagged products the uh the lime based you know the company we use ewi store they sell all these bagged render products which have got color in them as well yes I heard about them so you don't need to paint it just put those on it will allow the moisture to escape if there's any moisture in the wall but it doesn't look to me like there's anything terrible going on when I saw the photographs of this I thought I'll do it might be might be a little bit porous but it's pretty solid old stuff isn't it yeah this you can see what the problem is here blocked yeah exactly that's it you've got it in one we've got all the water from that side of the roof yeah yeah and probably a bit of your neighbors as well because yes because we're done well it tends to work that way once you've sorted out the external drainage problems and all you need is a good local Builder you don't need anybody fancy any of these big companies because they tend to be quite expensive you get some local diligent Builder ask around find who who the good guys are around here yes and get them in and they'll be able to take care of those little bits but yeah for this I would patch this up I would get the bag render I'm talking about cut this off patch it up if you haven't got enough air bricks here have you you've got one there's one there which is quite blocked up I'd probably hack it out I'd probably put in a new air brick there do I need to lower the ground there do you think is it a bit High yeah it would help that thing they said about putting fans under the floor okay it's a great idea if you have to but well back in the day nobody bothered I mean when this house was built all they relied on is natural ventilation yep standing since 1911. yeah oh look there's one here one down there it looks totally blocked up it's amazing isn't it how many of these air bricks were doing a great job and then somebody got some horrible bitumen paint or something put it on there that's the result so yeah clear that one or renew it maybe renew it perhaps it's easy isn't it smash that one out with them and get a nice terracotta one in there yeah just tap that render around the corner there and that is a bit Hollow sounding in places the fact that it's sitting on this surface and that stuff is It's Not Unusual for it to park company with the substrate so long as it's not falling off right it's not doing any harm the fact it's not actually yes or causing perhaps penetrating damp no no I don't think so I think you know there were cracks here but there isn't any on a scale of 10 being the worst temp yeah house I've ever seen interesting yes now one being or whatever I don't think you're anywhere above three really yeah really oh my goodness so there's often a lot to get your head around when you're buying a new home and Rosalind has certainly got a few things to consider there I hope she found our visit worthwhile actually I caught up with her later on and she told me that she had been in touch with Wessex water and they were really helpful in this sorting out that drain problem for her so I reckon once she gets rid of that then I think that them will disappear of its own accord so saved her a few quid there which you can spend on getting the other things fixed up now with minehead in our rear view mirror we're heading into deepest Cornwall to visit a barn conversion so keep up with this series there's a lot more to come and we're going to be making further visits around the country as and when we can find the time and the money

Channel: Skill Builder

Views: 76,864

Keywords: rising damp, damp proofing, penetrating damp, damp walls, damp proof course, curing rising damp, curing damp, damp problems, damp treatment, damp proofing internal walls, rising damp myth, damp in old house, condensation in wall, peter ward, real estate, damp proof injection, treating damp, damp patches on internal walls, how to treat damp walls internally, how to get rid of damp smell, how to treat rising damp in an old house, how to get rid of rising damp

Id: k9LdpRvnHpA

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2023