The One With The Damp Proof Membrane

Having spent the last two weekends pretty much solidly in our cellar, it’s probably fair to say, that we’re sick of seeing it. It’s cold, damp and let’s face it, really quite miserable down there.

Having said that, we are now finally starting to see some progress and last weekend we managed to lay a damp proofing membrane! Yep, I’m excited about damp proofing – isn’t it amazing what you can get excited about when you own a house?

As you already know, we removed most of the old floor covering a few weekends ago with the help of some very generous friends, but we still needed to remove a bit more of the loose rubble, any large pieces of brick and most importantly level the floor.

Admittedly we’d totally underestimated how long this step would take. Needless to say we were starting to get a bit disheartened after carrying bucket upon bucket of wet rubble up the stairs and into the skip in our driveway without actually seeing a difference in our cellar.

Luckily laying the membrane was much quicker and easier. Having spoken to our builder, we opted for a really thick membrane that’s less likely to get damaged while laying – and looking at the millions of little indentations (but no actual damage) from the gravely floor underneath, it was definitely good advice.

We didn’t snap any pictures of the actual laying (let’s just say after spending around 8 hours on a Sunday down there our thoughts were leaning more towards finally getting the damp proofing membrane installed and less focussed on taking pictures), but in general it was pretty straight forward. Any joins or corners have to be double taped, which essentially means that you first apply a thick double sided tape and then seal the joint again from the top with some more tape.

The next step is to have the concrete floor put in which should hopefully happen sometime later this week. Then we can finally get round to sorting the electrics, having the boiler moved, painting everything, adding storage… uff, the list still seems endless, but it’s great to be seeing some progress. We’ve even painted a small white test area on the walls to see if the paint we’ve chosen works on our brickwork. It’s always amazing how a simple coat of paint can transform a space and we think that clean white walls down here will make a huge difference.

Do you have damp problems in your home? We’re still only planning on using our cellar for storage, but what do you think we should do with our cellar?