The pub wall

Glf getting started, June 2021

The last leg of the LTRP (first pass) is under way! The side wall of the house, which forms one side of the pub 'garden', and which has been showing signs of damp on the inside since at least 2015, has at last received the attention it has been craving for so long.

The wretched Flf and sidekick who abandoned the shower restoration had been very scathing about how wet the wall was when the old tiles were removed. I'd engaged Clf and Clf 2 to make sure the roof was watertight back in November 2019, and Dlf and the Damp Men installed the damp proof membrane on the inside of all the accessible walls in September 2020, and Flf himself built a gully along the foot of the wall to prevent rain pooling there, so it should have been safe from water from above and below. The last part of the jigsaw was to investigate what might be underneath the cement render. So please give a Lolatastic! welcome to Glf, who arrived to carry out the investigation.

The idea was to take the render off only the bottom half of the wall, but when Glf reached the back of the house, which is where the shower is, he found the soaking wet bricks and we agreed that he needed to uncover the whole height. He did find a cracked gutter as well, which wouldn't have helped, but our best guess is that the old shower was probably putting water into the brickwork and the cement render was giving it nowhere to go, so there it stayed. Now that the new shower really should not be getting the brickwork wet, leaving the render off for a month or so should allow it all to dry out somewhat.

Buoyed by this vision of dry walls, I allowed some 'mission creep' to take place by adding an extra back wall into the equation, which had also been rendered with cement when damp started to show on the inside of the shower room in 2008. Looking back to the picture taken at that time, the exterior wall appeared to be in great condition despite the interior damp. As Glf removed the render that had been applied, the wall emerged even wetter than the side wall, and not in very good condition at all. This just reinforces my view that taking the render away is a Good Thing.

In between frequent hot drinks (Glf never failed to accept a drink when offered) we pondered the situation and what might need to be done next. The brickwork of the damp areas is in a poor state, but covering it up with impermeable cement is not the answer. Either it needs to be repointed, or rendered with lime mortar which is flexible and permeable. Glf reckoned that repointing would be the more expensive option, and has put me in touch with someone I'm going to call Glf's mate, who can do the rendering after the wall has been given a chance to dry.

Can you see the area of damp brickwork?