Buying house- damp- what to do?

kmmr

In which case there is always another house for you. If it's not right, it's not right!

Good luck!

Fire_Fox

As you have had a specialist identify the many causes of the damp, as long as you have a good builder (highly recommended, member of professional organisation) I would say the damp will get fixed. BUT if you can't afford the house then you have a problem.

With any renovation project you need a lot more money than you first think - your £15K sounds like wishful thinking unless you were intending to do most of the work yourselves? Do not underestimate how hard it is to live on a building site and go to work every day, honestly hell even without children. You will not be able to so much as have a cuppa without cleaning the kitchen! It's rarely a good idea to start out in a new home with a mortgage AND borrowing extra money even if from family.

marcg

Architect's opinion:

Don't touch! Don't touch! Don't touch! Don't touch!

The reasons you describe are serious:

cavities outside covered in debris,
I think this means cavity inside the wall as I can't understand what a cavity outside could mean. This means that your modern two-skin wall has been badly built - the gap between the inner and outer leaves is supposed to be clear of mortar and builders rubbish - so that any water condensing or making it through the outer skin rolls down the inside face of the outer layer, hits the bottom and seeps out through the weepholes. Crap builders let all the mortar muck fall into the gap, chuck empty crisp packets and off-cuts of timber etc etc into the gap which means the water runs down, hits this pile of rubbish and then soaks the inner face of the wall, causing internal damp.

defective cavity trays,
The cavity tray is a sheet over the top of windows or at the bottom of the cavity - it's job is to guide the water in the cavity out to the weepholes (it is sloped away from the inside of the house). A defective one might be installed back-to-front or flat ot not at all. either way the water is coming into the house rather than out.

wrong materials used in repointing,
Someone has mastic'd the brickwork joints rather than raking out and re-mortaring. This mastic doesn't properly keep out the water so water seeps into the joints, causing damage to the brickwork and allowing rain into the cavity.

leakage from the rainwater pipes saturating the brickwork and resulting in internal dampness
Not the end of the world, the guttering needs sorting out.

The business about the cavity is terminal. The house was badly built and will always have damp problems until someone demolishes the outside skin and starts again.

Don't touch!

queenA

Marcg- thank you for your very detailed reposnse. It was hard for us to ascertain whether the problems were easy to resolve or not, but you are definitely of the opinion that it is not worth the hassle! I will take on board!

Fire fox- trust me, we did not want to borrow from family as we thought our deposit would be enough- how wrong we were! With the hefty deposit required nowadays we were pretty limited as to what we could buy....thanks for your thoughts as well.