Hi there myself and a friend have been renting a house for a couple of months or so now and one of the rooms has a problem with recurring fluffy efflorescent salts coming through the plaster.
The room in question is at the front of the house and is below street level. The front wall opening onto a stairwell and the side wall is basically underground. It is these two walls that have the problem.
The landlady's builder has tried, unsuccessfully to sort this out a couple of times now. Firstly by scraping and repainting and secondly by increasing ventilation in the room. The salts however start to come back through about a week after they have been scraped off and in approximately the same places.
The decorator says that plaster has been treated to be damp-proof but whether this mens a chemical coating or the actual mix of the plaster I'm not sure. He has also used both oil and water based paints on the wall when redecorating.
Presumably this all means that the wall behind the plaster is wet and suffering from penetrating damp and that the problem won't go away until this is sorted.
I was just wondering what, in your opinion, should our landlady be doing to solve this problem as she clearly isn't doing it at the moment.
Apologies for the long post and thanks for the help.
The room in question is at the front of the house and is below street level. The front wall opening onto a stairwell and the side wall is basically underground. It is these two walls that have the problem.
The landlady's builder has tried, unsuccessfully to sort this out a couple of times now. Firstly by scraping and repainting and secondly by increasing ventilation in the room. The salts however start to come back through about a week after they have been scraped off and in approximately the same places.
The decorator says that plaster has been treated to be damp-proof but whether this mens a chemical coating or the actual mix of the plaster I'm not sure. He has also used both oil and water based paints on the wall when redecorating.
Presumably this all means that the wall behind the plaster is wet and suffering from penetrating damp and that the problem won't go away until this is sorted.
I was just wondering what, in your opinion, should our landlady be doing to solve this problem as she clearly isn't doing it at the moment.
Apologies for the long post and thanks for the help.
