Phil L wrote:
wrote:
We have now accepted and come to love our damp so I need as many
solutions for minimising the problem as you wonderful people can come
up with.
We have a Victorian terrace with a modern(ish) concrete floor
downstairs in the hall and back room, the front room has a suspended
timber floor. we have what looks like rising damp intermitently around
the whole ground floor. after posting on various websites like this
This is a newsgroup, not a website, but carry on..
one, having perplexed 'professionals' round to look at it and doing
my own research I have concluded (!) that the concrete floor is
pushing moisture to the edges of the room and up the walls. we may
You've concluded wrong Kev, and more to the point, you are wasting any money
and time you throw at this unless it's spent on installing a DPC.
also have a failing damp course but I dont want to get into this as
we cant afford to re-inject/replaster etc (I'm not convinced it is
failing either).
It is, or I should say, it already has...what you think a DPC involves when
you say you 'can't afford it' is beyond me, would you say the same if your
roof blew off?
so, we are going to decorate the whole ground floor and need to know
the best ways of going about minimising the problem. so far I have
come up with following potential ideas:
-take off skirting boards, attach wooden batten under the level of the
plaster but above the concrete floor to absord moisture, put skirting
back on.
Complete waste of time, effort and money - if you are taking any skirting
boards off, you should drill two holes in each brick and inject them with DP
liquid or gel - ******** to the firms who install and 'gaurantee' it - do it
yourself, both to save money and for your own comfort.
-ventilate skirting baords at various points
-damp proof concrete floor with sealant(?) before carpeting ??
-use damp proof paint as an undercoat (does this stuff work in these
circumstances or at all?)
No, DP paint is crap, it's cosmetic, like everything that you have mentioned
so far, none of it will stop the water rising through the brickwork until
you install a DPC
we are intending to paint the front room (timber floor) but the back
room and hall need papered as the walls are in bad shape. should we be
taking a different approach for the intended papered and painted
rooms?
any comments on the above welcome as well as any other ideas...
If you want to keep spending money on decorations every year, put up with
damp walls and risk timbers rotting (and inviting dry rot to destroy the
rest of the timber in your house) carry on...but you are throwing good money
after bad...how many 'professionals' have you paid to come and look at it so
far?
how much time and money have you spent on it so far?
How much do you think it costs to hire a sds drill and purchase a few drums
of DP liquid and a pump? - all that hacking off 1 metre of plaster is tripe
(I know because we used to install DPC on every house we renovated from 1981
to 1995) - it's only to satisfy the chemicasl company and to provide the
installers with extra money, for your own house, just remove skirtings,
drill, pump and replace skirtings, 3 months later no damp - redecorate and
forget.
I have to agree.
I lived with this sort of damp for year..and the only thing that works
is putting the heating on and opening the window.
That or stopping it getting in.
Under a house should not BE that damp...it doesn't get rained on...often
the bigger problem is that water isn't being cleared from around the
house, or worse, with suspended floors, is actually running underneath.
A french drain often helps a lot, and with suspended floors a sump with
a pump and a float valve.
Injection DIES work as long as the brickwork isn't so inaccessible or so
wide that you can't do it properly.