Hello,
I've just moved into a ground floor maisonette which appears to have a bit of a problem kitchen floor and I wondered if anyone had any ideas of a) what it is, and b) what I can do about it!
The floor used to be covered with vinyl tiles, through which there was a visible dip in this one area, which felt soft to stand on. When I took up the old vinyl, I found there had been an attempt to fill in this dip with what is probably a self levelling compound of some sort, but this had just cracked and sunk. I tried putting more self levelling compound on top, but the same thing has just happened again.
I decided to remove all the self levelling compound and took a hammer to it, underneath was just damp wood and I literally dug this hole in it with my hands. As you can see, it's gone all the way down to the blue sheeting which I think is the DPM. However, it's not one whole piece of sheeting, there is an overlap and several small holes, which doesn't seem right for a DPM.
Most of the kitchen floor feels fine and solid, apart from to the right of this hole, where the floor meets the wall, it seems to give ever so slightly when I stand on it, and the floor seems to be not quite meeting the bottom of the wall (this sounds more worrying than it looks...).
I've been told there was a leak here once, could this be the reason why it is damp?
I'm on a super tight budget, so any ideas for something I can do myself to fix this would be ideal!
Many many thanks for any ideas,
Katie
I've just moved into a ground floor maisonette which appears to have a bit of a problem kitchen floor and I wondered if anyone had any ideas of a) what it is, and b) what I can do about it!
The floor used to be covered with vinyl tiles, through which there was a visible dip in this one area, which felt soft to stand on. When I took up the old vinyl, I found there had been an attempt to fill in this dip with what is probably a self levelling compound of some sort, but this had just cracked and sunk. I tried putting more self levelling compound on top, but the same thing has just happened again.
I decided to remove all the self levelling compound and took a hammer to it, underneath was just damp wood and I literally dug this hole in it with my hands. As you can see, it's gone all the way down to the blue sheeting which I think is the DPM. However, it's not one whole piece of sheeting, there is an overlap and several small holes, which doesn't seem right for a DPM.
Most of the kitchen floor feels fine and solid, apart from to the right of this hole, where the floor meets the wall, it seems to give ever so slightly when I stand on it, and the floor seems to be not quite meeting the bottom of the wall (this sounds more worrying than it looks...).
I've been told there was a leak here once, could this be the reason why it is damp?
I'm on a super tight budget, so any ideas for something I can do myself to fix this would be ideal!
Many many thanks for any ideas,
Katie