Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone could help me get to the bottom of a dampness mystery in my home.
Please bear with me....
A while ago I had a leak in my bathroom which spread through my store cupboard and then into my living room wall.
I got my bathroom repaired through insurance and my living room redecorated too. The decorators stripped all the wall paper in the living room, dried out the damp patch on my living room wall using dehumidifiers and fans, eventually getting the wall dry.
They then replastered the walls only to find that the patches which had previously been damp just wouldn't dry. So again we got dehumidifiers and fans in and the patches were dried out. The wall was painted and everything seemed fine - until a couple of days later the same patches showed up as damp again!!
The insurance company then got some nitrate tests done to see whether the problem was rising damp. Now this is where it gets even stranger.
The Nitrate test showed that one side of the living room wall (the cupboard side) had no nitrate contamination (the liquid was a yellowey brown colour) but the the other side did (the liquid went bright red). The guy that did the test didn't really seem to know what he was doing - he scraped bare brick from the cupboard side of the wall but all he tested was the plaster from the living room side.
I have just had Kenwood Damp proofers over to do a survey (Rising damp isn't covered by insurance) and the bloke there seems to think that the plaster itself may have been contaminated or that the wrong plaster had been used (apparently there's a special type of plaster you're meant to apply to damp walls??).
He's not entirely sure that a damp proof course would solve the problem although he does say that the cupboard side of the wall IS showing signs of dampness as is the concrete floor of the cupboard (although I've been told that's natural as concrete is damp by nature).
Anyway, apologies for the meandering story but I am at a loss as to what to do next. I've got a damp living room wall and several experts giving me conflicting advice!
Can anyone help?
Thanks in advance
Rajan
I was wondering if anyone could help me get to the bottom of a dampness mystery in my home.
Please bear with me....
A while ago I had a leak in my bathroom which spread through my store cupboard and then into my living room wall.
I got my bathroom repaired through insurance and my living room redecorated too. The decorators stripped all the wall paper in the living room, dried out the damp patch on my living room wall using dehumidifiers and fans, eventually getting the wall dry.
They then replastered the walls only to find that the patches which had previously been damp just wouldn't dry. So again we got dehumidifiers and fans in and the patches were dried out. The wall was painted and everything seemed fine - until a couple of days later the same patches showed up as damp again!!
The insurance company then got some nitrate tests done to see whether the problem was rising damp. Now this is where it gets even stranger.
The Nitrate test showed that one side of the living room wall (the cupboard side) had no nitrate contamination (the liquid was a yellowey brown colour) but the the other side did (the liquid went bright red). The guy that did the test didn't really seem to know what he was doing - he scraped bare brick from the cupboard side of the wall but all he tested was the plaster from the living room side.
I have just had Kenwood Damp proofers over to do a survey (Rising damp isn't covered by insurance) and the bloke there seems to think that the plaster itself may have been contaminated or that the wrong plaster had been used (apparently there's a special type of plaster you're meant to apply to damp walls??).
He's not entirely sure that a damp proof course would solve the problem although he does say that the cupboard side of the wall IS showing signs of dampness as is the concrete floor of the cupboard (although I've been told that's natural as concrete is damp by nature).
Anyway, apologies for the meandering story but I am at a loss as to what to do next. I've got a damp living room wall and several experts giving me conflicting advice!
Can anyone help?
Thanks in advance
Rajan
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