Hi
I'm after a bit of advice.
Our house is suffering from penetrating damp around 3 sides of the house caused by high surrounding perimeter paths and raised gardens. It's an old farm house and has solid walls, no real footings and no DPC.
We have had the paths lowered as much as we can but we're at a stage where we've got to the guttering run off underground pipes so we can't go any lower and we're still at a level above the internal floors.
So it looks like we could do with a French drain around the perimeter to stop the water being held against the walls and permeating inside where it's blown all the plaster off(inside will need replastering with lime based plaster to allow it to breathe)
Anyway having unsuccessfully found any builders that didn't want to do anything apart from drill and inject i'm going to dig the drain myself. However I have a slight concern about digging a trench along the full length of one side of the house as in parts its 3 stories tall and the footings are pretty shallow.
This is a picture of the longest run I'll need to install the drain
You can see it's quite a sizable wall
I've sunk a few test holes along that wall till I've found what is the bottom set of stones these are only about 20cm below the level you can see in the first picture.
So i'm after a bit of advice as to whether digging down to this level will jeopardise the safety of the wall in anyway? or if I were to dig down a further 10cm so that the top of the land drain pipe is level with the bottom of the footing
Thanks in advance for any advice
I'm after a bit of advice.
Our house is suffering from penetrating damp around 3 sides of the house caused by high surrounding perimeter paths and raised gardens. It's an old farm house and has solid walls, no real footings and no DPC.
We have had the paths lowered as much as we can but we're at a stage where we've got to the guttering run off underground pipes so we can't go any lower and we're still at a level above the internal floors.
So it looks like we could do with a French drain around the perimeter to stop the water being held against the walls and permeating inside where it's blown all the plaster off(inside will need replastering with lime based plaster to allow it to breathe)
Anyway having unsuccessfully found any builders that didn't want to do anything apart from drill and inject i'm going to dig the drain myself. However I have a slight concern about digging a trench along the full length of one side of the house as in parts its 3 stories tall and the footings are pretty shallow.
This is a picture of the longest run I'll need to install the drain
You can see it's quite a sizable wall
I've sunk a few test holes along that wall till I've found what is the bottom set of stones these are only about 20cm below the level you can see in the first picture.
So i'm after a bit of advice as to whether digging down to this level will jeopardise the safety of the wall in anyway? or if I were to dig down a further 10cm so that the top of the land drain pipe is level with the bottom of the footing
Thanks in advance for any advice
