Hi,
Any advice on this would be appreciated please. I have an old 1900 Victorian mid terrace that has damp patches in the upstairs bedroom, approx 25ft above ground level! All research suggests this is penetrating damp, is that correct?
The walls are two bricks on the outside skin, a cavity and then one brick on the inside skin. The cavity has been checked, emptied and an air brick and vent put in the bedroom and outside wall to encourage airflow.
The damp patches only started appearing after we had the old wooden frames taken out and uPVC units put in. The damp seems to leech in from where the wooden window frame joins the internal wall into the bedroom. I am thinking that the window fitters must have really wrenched the old frames out and loosened the overall fixings to the wall allowing a small gap for water to enter by capillary action. I have tried to seal along the external wall frame to wall join with a silicon based sealent and it seemed to do some good.......until today!
The snow melted very quickly here and there was a huge amount of water running down the side of the house, the typical damp patches were seen on the internal bedroom wall but more worryingly was the drips which started to appear in the room below! Gouging away a bit of plaster has revealed that the water has soaked a long way into the internal skin and bricks.
I have a number of questions really, should/could I use one of these clear silicon waterproof shields on the bricks outside and will this stop it?
Is it really possible for enough water to soak through bricks to cause a substantial drip or could it be a more traditional leak somewhere in the roof/guttering?
The water only seems to enter the bay in the bedroom where the wooden frame joins the wall. The 2 feet above the frame up to the ceiling are completely dry.
This is really doing my head in and I'm petrified it's going to cost a small fortune to fix so any advice please, plus I have a photo of the situation if my dodgy explanation does not suffice :)
Thanks in advance,
Ben.
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