Waterproof membrane for damp walls

[Stillhatemondays]

Sorry for the very boring thread!

I live in an old house with stone walls which are prone to having water coming through. I particular, the external wall at the rear of the house has a lot of exposure to rain and wind, I now have rising damp on that wall with peeling paint etc.

I’ve had a survey and there are two options. The first is the usual damp proofing/plastering aproactive, the second is more extensive and would involve covering the whole wall with a waterproof membrane and, plasterboard and then skim plaster. I’d never heard of the latter - has anyone had this done and did it work?

Thanks

I have done this on a previous house , victorian ,one side of the house where the kitchen (downstairs) and bathroom ( upstairs) were only single brick. The walls were damp and cold . Removed the plaster down to the bare brick and covered them in one piece of 1200 gauge Dpm battened them out with 50 mm timber and used stainless steel screws into the walls to stop them rusting. Insulated between the battens with glass fibre type insulation and plasterboard over. You could use insulated plasterboard now for better results but this was 25 years ago before it existed.

we lived there for 20 years after that and never had any problems the walls were warm and dry. I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

I assume you have had all the usual checks done? Gutters are clear and not leaking, pointing is in good state of repair, ground level outside the house is lower than the damp proof course/ or if no damp proof course about 15cm or more lower than the internal floor, plenty of sub floor ventilation, air brick etc?

It is likely that one or more of these are causing the damp and if you enclose the damp wall rather than dealing with the cause of the damp, the wall will degrade over time and the floor joists will rot.

We had an external mains pressure leak near our house which meant that the entire back wall was damp up to almost head height. We repaired the leak, took the tanking off, which had been applied by the previous owners and replastered with lime plaster and the wall has been completely dry ever since.

Damp, wet bricks / stone will not deteriorate they can stay wet for hundreds of years underground with no damage to them.

here’s a picture of the foundations on our house , those bricks are permanently wet with Dpm behind them , I’ve dug bricks out the ground hundreds of years old and you could reuse them no problem,

wind, rain and frost will erode bricks ,but a brick/ stone that’s wet,damp will be fine.

Please please please read Heritage-house.org for all the reasons why this is likely to be a total con (his page on the "https://www.heritage-house.org/damp-and-condensation/the-fraud-of-rising-damp.html fraud of rising damp" is incredibly enlightening)

Peter Ward, who runs the website, wrote the Haynes manual for Victorian houses and specialises in anything older than 1930. He explains it all really clearly (and he's on YouTube too). We are currently undoing all the work done by the bandit "damp proofing" company who put in these membranes and chemical dpcs, plaster etc without actually fixing any of the causes.

You can also check out Sympathetic_Restoration on Instagram who has a series of videos explaining it all. He had his survey done by Peter Ward.

Oh wow, I’ve just come back and seen all these responses. Thank you all so much, I wasn’t expecting anything!

i’ve already had some repairs done to the gutters etc already. The house is stone built, I see a few mentions of brick but don’t think that applies to mine.

i’ll have a read of the replies in more detail, thanks again.