subject: It is the Season to Damp Proof House Walls with Exterior Wall Coatings [print this page] It is the Season to Damp Proof House Walls with Exterior Wall Coatings
It is, almost, the season to be jolly. It's certainly the season to start thinking about protecting your home for the winter. Leave it much longer and the winter will be upon you, which means any preparations you have yet to make will have fallen too far by the wayside. Before the horse bolts, they say, you should lock your stable door. It's time to lock the stable door on rising damp and its associated problems, by damp proofing walls with exterior wall coatings.
The British home is peculiarly affected by rising damp more so, in fact, that pretty much any other type of home in the world. That's a function of two unfortunate coincidences: the fact that the building materials most commonly available in Britain are superlatively porous combined with the fact that Britain as a geographic location gets more rain per annum than most other Western settlements; and the fact that the British landscape creates huge natural water bowls for all that rain to run into. Those water bowls, the troughs of the valleys that Britain is mostly made of, are where we build our houses (you can't build them on top of mountains, after all). No wonder we need to spend so much time damp proofing walls with exterior wall coatings.
What happens is this: it rains. And it rains, and it rains and it rains. That's the British autumn, doing what it does. All the rain runs down into the valleys and ends up filling up the water table which, in Britain, is feisty and quick rising. As winter sets in, the houses that have been built right over the water table start sucking water up through their porous foundations, spreading it around via little structural weaknesses, cracks and whatnot, until suddenly the poor home owner finds his or her windows covered with an unshakeable film of condensation; his or her curtains spattered with black mould; and his or her back wall starting to sag where the property is subsiding. Not good but easily preventable. Damp proofing walls with exterior wall coatings allow home owners to prevent the water from entering through foundations and rising up into the fabric of the home.
Damp proofing doesn't cost a great deal, if it's done early enough (i.e. now). Left until too late in the day, damp proofing is another matter entirely involving a hugely expensive drying out process before the damp proofing can even be put in place. The expenditure difference between preventive damp proofing and corrective measures taken after the event (bolting that stable door after the horse has fled) is massive. If damp is allowed to set in it can cause structural damage of an extremely serious magnitude even to the point where a building has to be knocked down. Damp proofing walls with exterior wall coatings stop all of this happening and, if done regularly, can prolong the beauty and value of a home by decades. It is the season to be prudent: get prepared and the winter will be just fine.
