Old barn conversion strange goings on with damp

[Breford]

Hi all,

I’m new to this forum so hope I’m in the right place. I was wondering if anyone could share their views / advice on a problem I’ve come up against. We moved into our new house in the summer, it’s a barn conversion that was carried out in 1975 (not very well). The building it’s self I can find any information about so that is something I want to learn more about. We plan to gut the inside and do the conversion again hopefully in a more characterful way. Anyway there are a few issues I need to sort out before then, the first being the damp and how they have dealt with it in the past.

In several places the walls are clearly damp inside at ground level and up to about 600mm. One section is particularly bad so that’s where I am starting. The whole property (old part anyway) has slates sunk into the ground and mastics around the tops as what I guess is a measure to stop damp. I excavated are yesterday and removed the slates, I believe they are trapping moisture rather than stopping it getting in. What I did not expect to find is that they go into what appears to be thick concrete. I have broken out the slates and a void of about an inch is now left between the concrete and house. To give an idea of levels the slates came to about 75mm above floor level. I dug out about 200mm of (quite wet) soil to reveal the concrete. When I moved into the house the gutter was flooding down into the flowerbed so that can’t of helped at all. Can anyone advise what may plan of action should be? You can see from the photos what I’m up against.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have also added photos of the whole house to give an idea of the building and the flower bed / slates I haven’t yet excavated.




Any advise would be appreciated. I am quite handy and up for doing whatever is required, have a digger etc.

Thanks for your help,

Brian

 

[Breford]

Is anybody out there?

 

[guitarust007]

What’s on the walls internally where the worst damp is? Have you tried removing some of the plaster and seeing what the brick work is like?

 

[Matt Green]

Given the previous use and the pattern on the outside surface, I think you may be looking at a problem with previous fertiliser storage or masonry saturation by animal urine, neither of which are a riotous amount of fun to deal with. What you have done is a good start; is there any way of finding out what sort of plaster the internal walls were finished with?

 

[Breford]

Thanks for the replies.

The construction of the building is ( as I think a lot of barn conversions are) there is a modern block wall inside the old walls. The internals of the house are basically a house within the walls of the old building. In the loft space with limited access I can see that some areas have a very small cavity and other areas have no cavity due to the internal block work straightening the wonky old walls outside.

The plaster in the whole of the house is a grey plaster, lime based? That area in question has been re plastered up to 1m with modern pink plaster though.

In the next few years we will be doing a serious re model of the house removing a lot of the internals and re arranging, vaulting areas etc so I want to get on top of these problems prior to then as much as I can.

Thanks,
Brian

 

[guitarust007]

Is it worth taking the plaster off the affected areas (especially if you can are going to do so at a later date) and checking the brickwork and letting it dry down? I wonder if the marriage of old vs new brickwork and whatever has been deposited/absorbed by the old outer brickwork at some point is the issue here?