is rising damp inevitable in an edwardian property

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DP and I have had an offer accepted on a house built in around 1900-1905. We've now found that there is extensive rising damp, which is going to cost around £5000 to treat, which will need to be done after we move in. It's going to be very disruptive - all the kitchen units and built in cupboards (there are quite a few) will need to be removed, and possibly the floor boards too.

We are dreading this level of disruption right after moving in and we are wondering about pulling out of the sale.

But what if we pull out, and find the same in the next place we make an offer on? All the properties in the area are a similar age.

So my question is, is rising damp in late Victorian/Edwardian properties inevitable?

Short answer, no. I’d start by looking for a cause. It could be that over the years the ground outside has been built up with soil etc. This would cause the damp course to be bridged.
Old properties can have leaking cutters and down pipes. Check these first.

I'm not sure how common it is but I don't have it in mine (1901).

I don't have it in mine - it was built in 1905 - and none have my friends in similar houses have had this, either.

Definitely not inevitable. We live in an 1890's cottage and have been in nearly a full year, no damp whatsoever. Not even a sniff of it I am pleased to say (after plenty in our 1920's semi).

No it's not. There's also a growing train of thought that there is no such thing (I'm not making up - I work with surveyors and check RICS). So, you need to find the cause which should hopefully be fixable.

I did a lot of reading on this when we were selling our house as I knew damp would come up due a damp patch in the downstairs bathroom. I also came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as 'rising damp'. Find the cause and treat it. In our case, it was the fact that paving had been laid too close to the house without an adequate French drain in place. The treatment was to cut a strip off the paving at a cost of £500. I'm sure some buyers would want to knock thousands off the price and get an injected DPC done!

I found a great company that came out and did damp surveys but didn't hard sell treatments - have used them on a commercial property I was looking after for a while and they located a displaced gutter. In neither case did they try to push expensive treatments on us.

I would just add that if I saw damp on a survey it definitely wouldn't put me off a property because I know in many cases it is relatively cheap to fix once the cause has been isolated.

"We've now found that there is extensive rising damp, which is going to cost around £5000 to treat"

were you by any chance told that by a person who sells damp treatments?

No, not inevitable. We had a proper damp survey done on the house we are buying and it hasn't got any.

Our house wss built in 1888 and had no damp for the first 17 years. Then the damp proof course failed on one wall.

When we had a survey done, a surveyor said he 'assumed damp would be on every wall' as it was on one, so told the buyer she would have to rip out the kitchen.

Our buyer pulled out...

We then got a proper damp survey and he confirmed it was just one wall, due to the neighbours building a path above our damp proof course.

We had it fixed, which cost 1k. Our buyer lost what she told us was her dream house totally unnecessarily.

If you love the house get a proper damp survey. Ours was £120.

I echo pp's comment that this might have been identified by someone with an incentive to diagnose damp.

Rising damp is vanishingly rare. Much more likely are: outside ground level too high, airbrick blocked so no ventilation, broken rainwater goods / lead flashing leading to water getting into the brickwork, leaking pipework, etc.

I recommend the forums on the period property website for some research before you invest any money in "solutions" from an injected damp course snakeoil salesman.

www.periodproperty.co.uk/forum/index.php

It depends. Do you mean damp that is visible or destructive or do you mean damp which is found by a man with a £50 damp reader he sticks in the walls?

You really need to understand what is causing any damp and assess the current damage. I wouldn’t rip out a decent kitchen to rectify “damp” that wasn’t causing issues.

Thanks all, really useful.

This is what happened:
Valuation survey said there might be damp. Mortgage company then said we'd need a "damp report". As PPs have said, the companies that do these reports are going to make money out of us if they find damp, so I am suspicious.

We got two companies to check, and they both found rising damp. They both also said the guttering is broken, but that this is not the source of the damp (but may be causing additional damp to the rising damp). When we viewed the property, there was no sign of damp downstairs (where there is apparently rising damp), but there was some staining upstairs which was probably caused by the broken guttering. Most rooms had been painted though, so this could have hidden the damp.

The snag is that our mortgage lender are now saying that we now have to get that rising damp fixed, with the paperwork to prove it, or they are going to reduce the amount they will lend us (by the cost of quote for treating the damp). So we are going to ask the vendor if they will drop the price.

We've got the structural survey the week after next, so I hope they can shed some light on what exactly is going on.

@loveka and @NovichoksAwayhow do I find a company that does a proper damp survey?

Wait and see what the structural survey says - hopefully the person doing it will be more educated in damp and may even have an idea whats causing it. You could let them know before they go that damp has been mentioned and ask them to pay particular attention to those areas.

Rising damp definitely can not be in an upstairs room!

Broken guttering frequently causes damp issues but is easy to fix. We had minor damp issues in the house I bought (didn't even bother with a damp survey, but as it was upstairs knew it would be fixable). One issue was due to the boiler needing to be serviced - an overflow pipe was dripping persistently against the brickwork. The other issue was due to the grouting seal around a sash window having degraded and water was coming in when it rained. Both easily fixable. May need a bit of detective work, so you need someone who can look at it logically.

I found a company on checkatrade. Where are you based? They talk about damp prevention on their website but don't mention any chemical treatments, which I was very keen to avoid having done some reading on the topic.

Here is a good read >
www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/-rising-damp-is-a-myth-says-former-rics-chief/5204095.article

I just did a google search, then kind of worked it out from their website. Generally I think charging for the survey is the key.

@NovichoksAway neither the damp survey companies or me are suggesting the rising damp is upstairs. I am just saying that is the only place I have observed evidence of possible damp. It seems likely that it is from the dodgy guttering. But the house has just been painted, so other visual evidence may have been covered.

We are in London. Is the company you used in our region? Thanks for the link, very interesting. I had no idea this was a controversial subject until today.

This has been a really useful thread. I have found some independent damp surveyors in the South East following reading your comments, so I will contact them after the weekend.

No it is not inevitable, however it is best to be prepared for things like this when buying a house, even more modern houses. There can be building defects from the time of the build, or defects from faults after building, like leaking guttering, high ground level outside the house, bridging of damp through wall ties or poorly fitted retro-fitted cavity wall insulation if there is a wall cavity. Also cavities filled with building rubble etc. if there are cavities, or issues with retro-fitted concrete floors where there where original wooden floors etc. Plumbing issues, it's all up for grabs really with quite a lot of property stock in the UK.

As you can probably tell, we have been having issues with our 1970s house, and through this, and lots of internet searching I would agree with anyone who advises paying for a survey from an unbiased surveyor who specialises in damp.

'Damp' is such a complex issue, and we have found that so many different 'professionals' in the building industry have had different views on what the problem is, and what the remedial work should be.

I would also say that sometimes damp does not need to be 'fixed', and sometimes it can be lived with. It really depends on the situation. we have had extensive surveys on our house and there are various different options available to us - it does not necessarily mean that the most extensive options like plaster stripping, chemical installation etc. will be necessary. Sometimes things like this apparently can worsen things as well too, as some houses were never made to be 'dry' as we expect in modern properties.

I have no qualifications so please take the above with a pinch of salt! I have done a heck of a lot of talking to different people and researching online though, so please forgive me if this is all a load of twoddle!

It depends on the area. It's very common in my part of SW London, as the Victorians basically built it over a marsh. With such wet ground most houses (Victorian/Edwardian) do have a problem with it from time to time. So common, in fact, that if you pulled out of a sale because of it, you'd be hard pushed to find another equivalent property to buy that didn't also have problems/would likely develop some in the future. It's a pain, but then not as expensive as other issues you might have in a property (try looking up how much it costs to get a new roof, for e.g.).

didn't they use a slate DPC?

Are you in a borough that was outside the London boundaries prior to LCC?

The company I used covers South London. Any good? If so I will PM the details.

Piglet my borough was part of LCC. Slate dpcs were used, but there is a fair bit of movement on the properties (shallow Victorian foundations, boggy ground), so there can be breaks in them by now. I'm also not sure if they were always used as they ought to have been. Our ground floor has no basement or crawl space underneath. We had problems with damp rising up under the floor. Investigations revealed all that was there to stop the damp was a wafer-thin layer of broken up bitumen over beaten earth. If it had ever been adequate protection, it has certainly deteriorated to the point of uselessness by the time we moved in.