Damp Specialists

Our customer was having some new flooring fitted which exposed that the floorboards were rotten and fell away when stood on.

The house was an end of terrace Victorian era house which unusually had a cavity wall. Several attempts at damp proofing had been undertaken including several injected damp proof courses and also stripping the plaster and tanking the lower part of the walls and re plastering in the usual way done by the majority of damp companies.

Lifting sections of the floor revealed that all the timber work was both soaking wet and rotten to various degrees. It also exposed that the earth sub floor was soaking wet and all the sub floor structural brickwork was also soaking and covered in a white mould.

After a thorough survey I realised that the cause of the problem was the soaking earth under the floor. The house was set low in the ground and below the adjacent road. Furthermore the house was at the lowest point in the road. Rain water was running off the road and adjacent land and running away towards the house / creating an environment where the sub floor was always soaking wet.

The solution was to take out the floor and sub floor of the entire downstairs of the house including all the brick pier walls that supported the floor, and tank the whole thing with a waterproof concrete to the base and a damp proofing slurry around the sides. We essentially turned the thing into a submarine.

We then re installed engineering brick piers to support the floors but rather than the original method which only left a “honeycombe” of holes for air movement we installed concrete lintels on the engineering brick piers which meant that the whole sub floor was more or less unobstructed in terms of air movement.

We then re installed the floor, insulated it and made good.