You can't legislate for Stupidity !

Ey up my faithful blogworms, todays tale is a tale of woe caused by stupidity and a lack of understanding.

Whatever you think of builders, when they build houses, they do things for a reason. Today I'm concerned with the dreaded damp !! Every house is built with a damp course of some sort and airbricks to allow airflow under your floors if you have suspended floorboards on joists.

Block these up at your peril !!!

We were called out to a house just recently where a lino fitter had gone to lay some new flooring in a kitchen and when removing the washing machine to floor under it the floor collapsed completely nearly sending the machine into the void space.

Not just the floorboards but the joists were riddled with rot and woodworm !!

 We had to remove half the kitchen, the worktop, the tiles, all the plumbing and nearly half the kitchen floor. The first joist near the wall crumbled in to dust, the second one was nearly as bad, the third one was full of worm  and the next two were rotten to half way along. The left hand section of the underdrawings was basically a pool of mud. The drain is outside this section ... read on for how this was affected !


You can tell by the pictures that the first three layers of bricks are soaked, all the plaster fell off and the damp had jumped the damp course. Using a damp test meter, we were nearly up to the window cill before we were showing reading close to normal !! 



The only course of action is to replace all the affected timber with new, membrane wrap the new joist ends to protect against damp again, we applied 4 coats of 3 in 1 Woodworm and rot protection. 







We wiggled and fed the new joists into place and treated them again. High as a kite by the time we'd finished !

All the joist were re-levelled, bedded on slate and cemented back in place, ready for putting the new floorboards back in.

New boards going down ready to start thinking about re-fitting the kitchen.

New worktops were opted for along with new tiling to bring the kitchen back to life again.




NOW, the reason for this was that some idiot at some point in the history of the house had decided in their infinite stupidity to raise the path to the side and along the back of the house using concrete. We reckon it's been like this for at least 15 years, which is when the current owners moved in. 

Not a problem .... you think ... it bloody is when the concrete goes half way up the airbricks and one of the airbricks was contained WITHIN a little retaining wall put round the outside drain to keep to water in check !!!!! I could not believe anyone could be this stupid !

This is one of a pair of semi detached houses and when you notice that next doors airbricks are at least 4"  (4 inches)( 100mm for the metricated among you) higher than the pathway, it gives an idea of how big a clown the guy who did this really was !

The airbricks are now cemented up and a local builder is fitting telescopic vents in to wall to correct the problem, the kitchen is back together and looking splendid

BUT and it's a big but, this affected wall runs along the back of the house ..... we've sorted the kitchen out but the room next to the kitchen along the same wall ..... it is the lounge ???


We were asked just to sort the kitchen out, we've not looked at the lounge .... I'll let you make up your own mind as to what state that's in ??

Airbricks and damp courses are very important .... make sure yours are OK and clear .... if you don't want this to happen to you !