www.heritage-house.org

It's almost inevitable that you will find damp in an old house. Nothing lasts forever, but despite the English weather, our old buildings can, and do stand the test of time. The worst enemy of old houses is we humans - it's generally what we do to them, or fail to understand about them, that causes most of the problems.

Most problems of damp in pre-1920's buildings have been caused since the war, when cement and gypsum plaster became widely available - these two materials are responsible for over 90% of the damage that we see. They are impervious, they trap moisture and cause rot - they are death to an old house. Add silicone sealants to a timber frame, and you have instant rot of oak which is probably 400 years old. I have seen new timber frames start to rot in 2 or 3 years when incompetent framers seal the panels using mastic instead of oakum, which can breathe.

• Rising Damp is almost non-existent - it rarely occurs naturally
• Injection Damp Proofing old houses is a WASTE of time and money - it doesnt work
• There is almost always a specific reason for damp, which is easily fixed
• Do NOT be talked into hacking old plaster off and re-plastering with gypsum, or worse still, waterproofing compounds
• Most so called rising damp is just condensation - the bottom of the wall is coldest, so moisture condenses near the floor - it doesnt rise!
• If you have a rotten timber frame, its because of all the modern materials used to plug the gaps and cover it
• NEVER use cement, tar, cement render, modern acrylic or silicone caulking on a timber frame - it will rot in front of your eyes
• Never use modern paints - they are death to old walls - they are plastic - they trap moisture and cause damp!!

Building conservation and restoration is all about understanding the built environment, and how it affects the materials which make up your home. By understanding this, it becomes a relatively simple task to sort out problems causing damp, and manage them for the long term. We can ALWAYS find the cause of damp, whatever form it may take, and I have to say that in our collective experience, we have NEVER had to drill hundreds of holes into the lower courses of brickwork, thereby destroying them, and inject chemicals (and they are going to magically 'soak' into brick, stone, mortar and fill all the gaps... dream on!) which are supposed to stop water from 'rising' up the walls, which never did anyway. Rising damp is a wonderful marketing tool used to sell millions of pounds worth of worthless chemicals and labour to an unsuspecting public, irreparably damaging structural brickwork in the process.

Please.... DON'T be fooled into using injection damp proofing - it's a waste of money. Take note that they nearly always make you hack off the plaster to the obligatory metre high - as in the photos below, and give it a 15 year guarantee - then in 16 years, when all the plaster falls off again, its magically out of guarantee, or the company vanished into thin air..

Every damp problem has a specific cause, and it is usually easy to fix that cause - for example, faulty guttering, external ground levels too high, concrete / cement render trapping moisture on outside walls, and so on. We can conduct a survey which will outline any problems, and suggest solutions, which will never include injection damp proofing!

Common examples of 'damp' and solutions...