Damp is unsightly, smelly, and can cause serious structural damage to your home — and it can be bad for your health. The longer you leave it, the more costly it becomes. The good news: treated properly, damp can be eliminated completely.
With constant exposure to damp, timber gradually decays — including your home’s critical structural timbers. Bricks and plaster degrade, and dangerous moulds release spores that contribute to allergies and health problems. If you ever want to sell, an untreated damp problem is off-putting to buyers and mortgage lenders, and can knock tens of thousands off the price. If you’re a landlord, tenants may be entitled to rent reductions or claims.
But if your damp problem is in a neglected basement, it’s quite possible to transform it into a new, liveable room — a spare room, office, gym or snug that adds real value. For any of this to happen, the remedial work has to be done just right.
If any one of these is missing, your damp problem won’t be solved — it may go away temporarily, then return sooner than you’d expect. Badly-performed work can even make things worse.
Identify the true cause — which isn’t always rising damp. It could be plumbing, guttering, pointing, a raised driveway or poor ventilation.
The right solution for your specific situation — most often a combination of measures, not a one-size-fits-all fix.
Skilled, qualified professionals using the right materials, so the damp doesn’t come back.
When you first notice a problem you’ll see damp patches, mouldy growths, condensation or water-pooling — these are symptoms. The underlying causes are something else. There are three main types: rising damp, condensation and penetrating damp, which account for most situations we see.
But on a surprising number of occasions the cause is different — faulty plumbing, leaky guttering, poor pointing, a raised driveway breaching the DPC, poor ventilation, wrongly-specified plaster, even a north-facing wall in constant shade. We’ve even found faulty water-board meters. Often these causes aren’t obvious, and only an experienced surveyor can properly identify them.
So the number one priority is: find the true cause. That’s the purpose of an initial survey — it saves a lot of money and heartache in the long run.
A large proportion of our work comes from professionals — architects, surveyors, insurers and contractors — who won’t work with most mainstream “damp specialists”. That’s the quality we offer you as a homeowner.
A fully-qualified surveyor visits, diagnoses the real cause, and emails you a full written report and quotation. Just £70 + VAT — fully refunded if you go ahead.