Hi folks!
So I lifted up the laminar flooring in the dining room of my 1920s house the other day to find damp rotten hardboard underneath around where a fire place used to be.
This is my first house and due to a really negligent surveyor (I'm taking legal action at the moment), I've already sunk a fortune into the property and really don't want to start spending a load more money that I don't have!!
It's a ground floor room and the old chimney that is on an external wall is ventialted in two places and covered correctly at the top. There is no evidence of rising damp at all as the skirting and plaster are bone dry. There are central heating pipes nearby, but I really don't think these are the cause of this problem as the damp seems to be a perfect rectangle.
The room's flooring is hardboard (5mm) lay on top of floor boards which then seem to have been painted with a black bitumen paint underneath and then sit on top of joists that are sunk into a concrete base.
The damp is a perfect rectangle around the fireplace, and when I removed the hardboard here, I found that this particular patch is hardboard sat on top of a stone/concrete hearth (I think it might be slate) and the floor boards surrounding by approxiately 6" of this are also really damp and rotten.
There is another very small patch of hardboard in the middle of the room that looks slightly darker, but when i cut the patch of hardboard out, the wood underneath looked fine, so I suspect this may be discolouration due to a previous spillage.
I suspect that the source of the problem may be the lack of damp proofing of the stone hearth before covering it and therefore, I am intending to put membrane over this before replacing the damaged floorboards and hardboard. However, I'm concerned that I might be missing a more sinister problem that I need to deal with and was wondering if anyone has any experience of a similar problem, or has any other ideas of what could be causing the damp?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
So I lifted up the laminar flooring in the dining room of my 1920s house the other day to find damp rotten hardboard underneath around where a fire place used to be.
This is my first house and due to a really negligent surveyor (I'm taking legal action at the moment), I've already sunk a fortune into the property and really don't want to start spending a load more money that I don't have!!
It's a ground floor room and the old chimney that is on an external wall is ventialted in two places and covered correctly at the top. There is no evidence of rising damp at all as the skirting and plaster are bone dry. There are central heating pipes nearby, but I really don't think these are the cause of this problem as the damp seems to be a perfect rectangle.
The room's flooring is hardboard (5mm) lay on top of floor boards which then seem to have been painted with a black bitumen paint underneath and then sit on top of joists that are sunk into a concrete base.
The damp is a perfect rectangle around the fireplace, and when I removed the hardboard here, I found that this particular patch is hardboard sat on top of a stone/concrete hearth (I think it might be slate) and the floor boards surrounding by approxiately 6" of this are also really damp and rotten.
There is another very small patch of hardboard in the middle of the room that looks slightly darker, but when i cut the patch of hardboard out, the wood underneath looked fine, so I suspect this may be discolouration due to a previous spillage.
I suspect that the source of the problem may be the lack of damp proofing of the stone hearth before covering it and therefore, I am intending to put membrane over this before replacing the damaged floorboards and hardboard. However, I'm concerned that I might be missing a more sinister problem that I need to deal with and was wondering if anyone has any experience of a similar problem, or has any other ideas of what could be causing the damp?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
