Search results

So far, I've only been haunted by the mounting cost of the repairs. :eek:

I had wondered if it was impermeable plaster pushing water up into the old lime plaster, because of all the salts accumulating at the join between the two, but I've isolated the old from the new by chipping out a channel back to bare brick (seen in my last photo) and the damp patch is still...

I'm trying to locate the source of damp on the walls whilst waiting for new timbers to acclimatise, and for the sub-floor to dry out a little - it's barely stopped raining for a week, so everything is a little... squelchy.

It was the frontage, and the original cornicing inside, that really drew me to the house (that, and it was ridiculously affordable because it had been trashed and bodged by successions of lazy landlords). Apparently this terrace was profiled some years ago by the local rag, and do have an...

That's mine, on the left - all polychrome, pointy bits, arches and corbels, like the architect got a copy of Ruskin's 'Stones of Venice' for Christmas and wanted to have a go at all of it on the cheap. As you can see, though, no one has been kind to it for a long long time. On the plus side, at...

There's no useful DPC - there's slate and engineering bricks directly on top of the foundation bricks... and that's it. And they would always have been buried under ground. There's a rudimentary French drain already in front of the wall, in the garden, but it's not nearly deep/wide enough and...

A bit of background: The house is ~1860 and has no practical DPC to speak of (engineering bricks and slate at the base of the foundations). After digging out parts of the bay window for expanding the airbricks (they were badly installed - above floor level, behind the skirting boards - when the...

Already got the DPC bought. After about 12 hours of heavy rain, the living room is now a collection of very modest ponds (about 1-2cm deep) - no sign of it pouring in, or it being the product of a leak, but rather just seeping up where the ground is lowest. I guess a high water table would...

The ground level outside, front and back, is about 1-2" below the air bricks. The houses either side have a similar gap, so it seems that's how it's always been. At the moment, the view of the air bricks is obstructed by debris from the renovation, but I'll take a photograph when it's cleared...

Okay, everything's been given a thorough scrape-out and sweep down. A few unearthed revelations... The hole in the middle of the bay leads to a perforated brick that butts up against the soil outside, and the hole is actually a slate-lined channel. What would be the function of actively letting...

I've knocked out a few bricks from the sleeper walls to aid ventilation, and it turns out that there was a DPC... or an attempt at one. There were engineering bricks, but not laid in a single, continuous course - just dotted about at random. And then there were some layers of a bituminous...

I wasn't able to find any structural 3.5" x 2.5", only 3.5" x 1.5" - so I was going to just sister them to make 3" wide. Again, not sure if that's sensible. A spot where the floor had been repaired previously had just used 100mm tall and cut notches to fit over the wall plates on the sleepers...

I'm replacing the suspended floor throughout the downstairs of my early-/mid-Victorian terrace (extensive rot and beetle activity), and the joists are a teeny-tiny 3.5" x 2.5". They're at ~40cm centres and the longest unsupported span between sleeper walls is ~130cm. I can't lower the sleeper...

It looks like the French drain comes from when the concrete was poured, rather than being cut in afterwards. In any case, I'll be getting rid of all the concrete in the front and back gardens at some point. The house has no DPC - it was built before they were mandatory, and none has been...

Already got lagging to go on the pipes, and the debris wood is already swept away. Not sure how much 'give' the pipes have for bending them straighter - they seem to have been installed wonkily to start with, if some parts are anything to go by. Don't want to inadvertently add damp back into...

The ground outside isn't too high. At the front there's a rudimentary French drain along the front wall and to the rear the concrete in the side return slopes away from the house. There didn't seem to be any sign of dry rot or beetle activity above the level of the floorboards - the skirting...

Room: Hearth area: Window Area:

Sorry for the delay in responding - work forever gets in the way of all this... fun... stuff. I've finally removed all of the timber from the floor, and I've found the source of the problem... which is that the air bricks don't actually go anywhere! The front wall is three bricks thick at the...

All of the floors are coming up anyway - those that aren't dangerously fragile have been chopped up and relaid several times over. It's a horrible squeaky mess of a jigsaw. They're being swapped out for T&G maritime pine when the root of the damp is solved. Are there any ways of encouraging...

The mortgage survey was rudimentary - plus the entire floor was covered in laminate, and there were none of the usual signs of damp or rot from above it. So there was no indication of an issue before we bought it and ripped up the laminate in the living room and hallway earlier in the week. The...