The part of a damp job that goes wrong most often is the part after the damp work. A wall is treated, the cause is fixed, the plasterer comes in the following week, the room is painted the week after, and by spring there is a patch on the new emulsion and a hollow area in the fresh plaster. In N17, where a great deal of solid-walled Victorian and Edwardian terrace is being refurbished at any one time alongside large amounts of post-war stock, reinstatement done too early accounts for a striking share of repeat visits.
Nothing dries until the source is off
Before any drying schedule is worth starting, everything feeding the wall has to be dealt with, and that includes the things that are easy to overlook: a weeping valve behind a radiator, a slow waste leak under a basin, a buried supply pipe, a blocked gully discharging against the brickwork outside. These produce a patch indistinguishable from a fabric defect, and a wall replastered over an unresolved leak will fail regardless of the specification used. Ruling out and repairing that side of it is where plumbing prices in Angel comes in, and it belongs at the start of the programme rather than the end.
How long a solid wall actually takes
A thick masonry wall that has been wet for years does not dry in a fortnight. As a rule of thumb, moisture leaves solid masonry slowly and from the surface inward, and the process is governed by wall thickness, how long it was wet and the conditions in the room. Drying is therefore judged by taking readings at the same points on the same wall at intervals and watching the trend flatten, not by looking at it. Gentle background heat with the room ventilated, or controlled dehumidification, speeds it considerably; a fan heater aimed at one patch does not. The principles behind that judgement are set out on what the service covers.
Salts, and the render designed to hold them back
Years of evaporation leave hygroscopic salts concentrated in the plaster, and those salts draw water from room air whenever humidity rises, so a patch keeps reappearing on a wall that is otherwise dry. Skimming over contaminated plaster fails for that reason. The affected plaster is hacked off back to a sound background and taken generously beyond the visible edge, because the salt band always extends further than the stain. A salt-retardant renovating render goes on in coats to a specified thickness, or, on an older solid wall where breathability matters, a lime-based system that lets the masonry continue to dry through rather than pushing moisture sideways into adjoining plaster.
Skirtings, architraves and the floor edge
Skirtings come off before the wall is treated and they generally do not go straight back. Water collects at the floor junction, so the board behind is the wettest part of the wall and needs to be exposed while it dries. MDF skirting that has swollen and delaminated is replaced rather than refitted, and new boards are fixed with a small gap behind them so air can reach the plaster rather than sealing it in. Timber that has been repeatedly wet is checked for decay before anything is fixed to it. Removing skirting frequently exposes droppings and runs along the floor edge that nobody knew about, and where that happens, Tottenham pest control team deals with it.
Paint, and the temptation to finish early
New render needs a thinned mist coat before anything else, and the finishing paint should be a breathable mineral or contract emulsion rather than a vinyl silk or a one-coat product with a plastic film. A vapour-tight coating on a wall still giving up moisture blisters and peels within months, and a bathroom-grade paint is the worst choice on a drying wall despite sounding like the safest. Decorative finishes are best treated as the last stage of a job that may run across two seasons, not as the end of a fortnight's work. Similar reinstatement in the surrounding districts is covered by vetted mould removal in Seven Sisters.
Living with the work and how it is quoted
Most of this can be done room by room, so a household does not have to move out, provided one room at a time is accepted as unusable. Dust from hacking off is considerable, and sheeting up and taping doorways is part of the job rather than an extra. Reinstatement is quoted separately from remediation, by the wall area being replastered and the number of coats specified, because a single chimney breast and three full walls are not the same undertaking. Second-fix joinery, skirting replacement and fixing back is covered by Tottenham handyman team.