We’re the only damp-proofing company that offers a 50-year guarantee.
Damp is unsightly, smelly, and can cause serious structural damage to your house.
Not only that, but it can also be bad for your health.
And the longer you leave it, the more costly it becomes.
With constant exposure to damp, timber gradually decays – including your house’s critical structural timbers. Bricks and plaster degrade. And dangerous moulds, which release spores into the air and contribute to allergies and health problems, thrive.
Aside from the smell and ugly damp patches, these are significant issues you really don’t want to live with.
And if you ever want to sell your house, having an untreated damp problem can be very off-putting for buyers and mortgage lenders. The selling process becomes trickier and may result in a much-reduced sale price, costing you tens of thousands of pounds.
Plus, if you’re a landlord, tenants will often be entitled to rent reductions or even make potential claims against you.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that, if they’re treated properly, damp problems can be completely eliminated.
And – if your damp problem is in a neglected basement – it’s quite possible to transform it into a new, liveable extra room in your home.
Your whole house can become a place to use and enjoy, instead of having unpleasant areas you tend to avoid.
But for this to happen, the remedial work has to be done just right.
Water has an amazing ability to penetrate even the slightest fault-line.
Beware!
To eliminate damp problems effectively, for many years to come, three things are vital. You need to:
If any one of these three is missing, your damp problem won’t be solved.
The damp may go away temporarily – but it will inevitably return, probably much sooner than you’d expect.
In fact, wrongly-placed waterproofing can exacerbate a problem by preventing much-needed ventilation.
In other words, badly-performed work can actually make things worse!
First of all, you need to be clear about the problem you’ve got.
If you don’t get an accurate diagnosis, you can easily apply the wrong remedy – which will fail, or make things worse.
And if you don’t get the work done to a very high standard, using the right materials, then damp can come back all too soon.
That’s why you need experienced specialists who take the time – and have the skills and knowledge – to get things right.
Let me be frank. Dampcoursing Ltd may not be the cheapest company around.
You can find other companies who’ll offer surveys for free, and quote cheaper prices for carrying out what looks like the same the work. It’s all very appealing. But it comes at a big cost to you.
At the first vital step of identifying your problem, you may not get a qualified surveyor at all – but instead a completely unqualified employee, who simply gets the sign-off from someone at HQ with the relevant letters after their name.
Not a good start.
Then, based on a superficial survey, you may well be recommended the wrong treatment, unsuitable for your particular problem. And most likely the work will be done in haste, by workers lacking the necessary skills and experience for what is inescapably a specialist task.
Essentially it tends to be a rush job by under-qualified people, and it’s very easy for things to go wrong. Not necessarily immediately. But the consequences of sub-standard work will come back to bite you sooner or later.
We don’t operate like that at all.
Here at Dampcoursing Ltd we’re committed to extremely high quality work.
In fact a large proportion of the jobs we get are from professionals, or recommendations by professionals.
To be blunt, these professionals – architects, surveyors, insurers, contractors etc. – won’t work with most mainstream so-called “damp specialists”, because the standard of work simply isn’t good enough.
These professionals – the people who really know how damp-proofing should be done – ask us at Dampcoursing Ltd. instead.
And that’s what we can offer you as a home-owner: a high-quality damp-proofing service recognised and used by the industry professionals.
In short, our top-quality service consists of:
it’s why we’re approved members of the government-endorsed quality scheme, Trustmark, and accredited by CHAS, the PCA and Constructiononline – industry bodies which all require high standards of professionalism.
So we don’t offer you lots of freebies. And though we try, we certainly can’t promise you the lowest price.
But you can be absolutely sure of one thing: our work lasts for a very long time, and we guarantee it.
When you first realise you have a damp problem, you’ll see things like damp patches, mouldy growths, condensation, or in the worst cases, water-pooling.
These are the symptoms of damp.
The underlying causes of damp are something else entirely.
There are three main types of damp: rising damp, condensation, and penetrating damp. These account for most of the situations we come across.
However, on a surprising number of occasions we find completely different causes.
These can range from faulty internal or external plumbing, to leaky guttering or poor brick pointing.
It could be something like a raised driveway that breaches the house damp-proof course (DPC). Other factors like poor ventilation, wrongly specified plaster and even a wall being north-facing or in constant shade all play a part too.
Buildings are designed to cope with a lot – but not all at once.
We have even come across houses where the water board has fitted a faulty meter. In this case, no matter how good the building fabric design, water will constantly find its way into the home.
Often these other causes are not obvious, and it’s only a surveyor with years of experience who can properly identify them.
It’s also essential to take into account construction type and what use the building was originally designed for.
Clearly you don’t want to waste your money on a damp-proof course if the real cause of your problem is nothing to do with the fabric of the building. Most likely there’ll be a combination of factors to deal with, requiring a combination of measures to put things right.
So the number one priority is: find the true cause!
That’s the purpose of having an initial survey done.
Finding the true culprit will save a lot of money and heartache in the long run. So you want to get it right from the outset.
As I hope is now obvious, damp is a complex issue to understand. And to fix different types of damp requires quite different solutions.
Given the variety of different causes of damp, it’s critical to apply the correct solution for the particular problem.
Here at Dampcoursing Ltd we offer you the full range of damp-proofing treatments, all undertaken by our team of highly skilled professionals:
I won’t go into the details of all the different treatments here. You can read more about them on our SERVICES page.
But the point is that we are specialists in every possible damp-proofing solution that you could need.
For more than sixty years we have successfully treated damp problems in all types of buildings – houses, flats, mansion blocks, office blocks, schools, hospitals, churches – in every conceivable situation you can imagine.
Damp patches, drips, running water, puddles, flooded basements, walls covered with mould and slime – you name it, we’ve fixed it!
And as the science behind damp eradication has progressed, we’ve literally been involved in writing the textbooks on damp-proofing.
There’s nothing that we haven’t seen. And we can put all that experience and expertise to work for you, to get rid of your damp problem for good.
Getting rid of a damp problem is not just a huge relief – no more damp patches, horrible smells, or damage to your property and possessions – it could also give you the opportunity to make much more of your home.
If you’ve got a damp basement or cellar that is never properly used, but just a place for storing old bits and pieces – you could transform it into a lovely new room or usable space.
Our team at Dampcoursing Ltd can turn any unused, cold and damp area into a space you can enjoy just like any other part of your home.
Whether you decide it should be a spare room, bathroom, office, kitchen, cinema, gym or a snug – your dingy basement could become something special, and add substantial value to your property.
If you’d like us to help with your damp problem, the first step is to arrange for one of our surveyors to visit.
Our surveyor will come to your property and do a thorough investigation. This will take from 30 minutes to an hour or so, depending on the nature of the problem.
We will produce a full report of their findings. This usually takes a day or two to complete, and is emailed to you immediately.
The report
This takes some time, and involves our professional expertise.
For this reason we do make a charge for the survey and report.
Our price is £125.00 + VAT. Not much when you consider all the benefits of getting an expert diagnosis, and the potential costs you’ll save by avoiding unnecessary works and wrong treatments.
And this cost is fully refunded to you if you instruct us to go ahead with any of our proposals.
To be clear: having a survey done doesn’t commit you to anything else. If you don’t want to take it any further, that’s fine. And you’ll still have a detailed professional report giving you a full explanation of your problem and its remedies. This will be invaluable in helping you with any decisions you need to make.
Of course if you would like us to get rid of your damp problem, we’d be delighted to go ahead with the work, at a time that suits you.
Please don’t forget that here at Dampcoursing Ltd. we’re committed to offering you the very best possible service:
If you’d like to go ahead with getting rid of your damp problem – either by booking your initial survey, or by asking us any other questions – just call or email us now:
We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much for your interest.
Bengt Saelensminde
Contracts Manager
Dampcoursing Ltd
020 8802 2233
info@dampcoursing.com