A puddle in my living room

[Kendodd]

Or well, a wet patch about the size of an A3 piece of paper. It's next to and up against an external wall on the carpet, the wall seems dry though. The house is about 300 years old and we have lived here for just coming up to one year. When we moved in we had some damp treated but not that wall. Could it be damp/ground water coming up? What else could it be and what should we do about it? We have no money for expensive treatments.

Cat? Dog? Toddler?

No definitely not, it's to big and was soaked up last night to reappear this morning.

You may have a burst pipe somewhere -sounds like there is a lot of water somewhere as I am not sure damp would seep through so quickly.

Do you have a solid concrete floor? If so, and your central heating pipes run under the floor through the concrete, they could have corroded and be leaking. This happened in my parents' home. If this is the problem it will require re-routing of the pipes through conduits and over the ceilings. If, however, you have a board floor with cavity underneath, I have no idea.

Check your external walls, as it has been raining a lot recently. We had an overflowing gutter which sent water down the front wall; it then found its way through holes in the brickwork and appeared in our living room. Clearing the gutter/drainpipe stopped the problem immediately.

We do have a solid concrete floor, no heating pipes running through it though as we installed the heating recently, the house had non before. The land outside slopes down with the higher end at that side of the house so this bit of floor is just below ground level. There is a ditch/drainage running along the outside wall that I have cleared but the floor would still be just below the bottom of that. The drainage channel runs along the side of the house and down to join a river at the bottom of the garden.