The second reception room sometimes smells a bit damp and musty – it seems to be coming from the floor, around the edges(which is carpeted) . The front half of the house (two rooms and the hallway/stairs) has a suspended floor, which has a subfloor space of about three feet deep below it. The only access to it is a makeshift hatch in the under stairs cupboard.
The pictures show the wall at the back (chimney breast alcove, gable end) and the wall to the right which is another external wall with a rainwater gulley outside it. These two walls are the dampest of all the house, and the ground (clay soil/builders rubble) is also fairly damp. There is an original bitumen damp proof course, which you can roughly see the line of drier bricks above. The airbrick on the gable has been blocked off at some point, someone has left broken piece of the airbrick behind as a clue! The short joist adjacent to the gable has been replaced with new – whether that was necessitated by the lack of an airbrick, or the builder thought that the airbrick was the cause of the joist rot, I don’t know!
I have removed the offending replacement brick and fitted a cast iron airbrick- this should help airflow in this corner of the building.
There is some dampness on the bricks above the damp proof course, and there were snails hanging out on the gable wall (behind the joist in the pic above), just underneath the floorboards! Is this dampness caused by penetrating damp from the borderline-high ground levels, or insufficient air circulation underfloor?
Bricks above damp proof course have a lot of salts on their surface -perhaps they have been much damper in the past?
Going outside to check the levels, the damp proof course is currently just few mm above the level of the lawn/path/concrete – not ideal. (Edit – The concrete has now been broken out, and a small trench has been dug around the house in this area, two bricks below the damp proof course.
Another worry is that the ground dampness could be caused by a leaking drain. The gulley shown above is the original salt glazed item, the pipes underground may also be original, and could be broken or leaky.
Victorian home to roost 