Disappointingly the addition of the dehumidifier and the fan made very little difference to the condensation levels on the windows this morning. I am still mopping up pools of water on the sills and as soon as I dry the windows they are steaming up again… We need to get more heat in the house. It is too difficult to light the fire as the logs are at the back of the garage underneath loads of shit and my back is not great after treatment yesterday. We need more heaters as we only have 2 and they are not really doing much…
Peeling back the Ram Board on the flagstone floor I find salts are coming through where the floor is quite damp. The floors have been covered in black plastic for weeks to protect them from the plaster, so it is no surprise this has happened, they haven’t been able to breath.
Salts coming through the flagstone floor!
These are salts growing out of the study wall! This was the dampest room (when it rained very heavily a couple of months ago the water poured in through the walls) mainly due to the ground levels outside. Now these have been lowered the room is drying out for probably the first time in many decades!
A corner of the study at the front where you can see the clay that the walls are sitting on. This is still quite wet but you can see it cracking as it is drying out. That is the trouble with clay, when it dries it shrinks quite considerably and cracks.
Clay footings that have already dried and cracked.
Unfortunately the hose pipe we rigged up last night was not taking the water outside as it should, instead it was sitting in the pipe and backed up this afternoon and just started pissing out all over the floor… So back to having the water decant into a plastic box.
This afternoon I put out a message to the village WhatsApp group asking to borrow some portable radiators and within 30 minutes I was inundated with more than I needed! One of our neighbours across the road heroically carried 3 heavy oil heaters over and up our stairs, then more and more arrived! I was overwhelmed and humbled by the response. This is the amazing thing about living in such a wonderful village 🙂
I then had a massive deadline to hit for some work so had to disappear for 4 hours, but Colin rushed over, took Jasper the dog for a run and then proceeded to set up a radiator in each room. Not as easy as you think as we only have a handful of electric sockets in one side of the house, so have lots of extension cables. Each time I plugged in a heater it would blow a fuse in one of the extension cables…
I left Colin to replace fuses, move heaters around so they weren’t overloading one socket and accept even more heaters from more people in the village! He also hoovered the rest of the house that he didn’t manage to finish at the weekend. Thank you Colin, we owe you big time!
Crossing fingers and toes that all the heaters make a difference to the condensation levels in the morning…