Leaky Lockdown Chaos

Our house has sprung a leak. It’s probably been there for some time, but extended working from home makes these things more noticeable. Extraneous water was first noticed in the tiny cloakroom (and I mean tiny, think the smallest toilet you’ve ever seen on a plane) when a different leak was noticed under the washbasin, running down from the cold tap. The plumber arrived and fixed that, so we took up the vinyl sheet to allow the concrete floor to dry. There was black mould on the underside of the vinyl, which was consigned to the garden. Noticing the dark patch on the concrete extended under the door we pulled back the carpet and underlay in the hallway to reveal that floor was damp too. So were the doorposts, having swelled because they had been sucking up moisture, causing the toilet door to stick.

That was during the November lockdown. Since the washbasin tap was repaired, the doorposts have shrunk and we can close the toilet door. Everything else is still damp and in an attempt to trace this further leak the water to the toilet was turned off for a week, which made no difference. At least we could no longer blame that toilet. Next the panel behind the toilet was taken out to see if the pipework there was the source of the leak. It wasn’t. 

The vinyl in the next-door shower room was peeled back, revealing the chipboard flooring there to be dry by the shower, until we moved around the corner to the second toilet, where damp was suspected. The facts that the plaster was blowing off the walls, there was black mould and and the screws holding the boards down were rusting were a bit of a giveaway.

However even cutting and pulling the vinyl so far back that it ripped and will probably have to be replaced didn’t reveal the source of the leak. Neither did removing the bit of board below the boiler. So next up came the flooring screws, well some of them. The first eight or nine were easy. Why more than fifty screws were deemed necessary to control less than one and a half square metres of flooring is unclear. Most of them were rusty, half a dozen totally immobile. Naturally the flooring ran beneath the skirting so that was all removed too.

Below the chipboard flooring the concrete floor is wet, not merely damp. Below the boiler is a void, which is also wet. The source of the water is still unclear. So while we wait for the plumber the window in the shower room is open to try to dry it out, causing freezing air to flow through to the house. The flooring from the unusable shower room is cluttering the small study/bedroom, the tiny toilet is usable but freezing cold and the hallway carpet and underlay are still rolled back creating multiple trip-hazards on the way to the kitchen.

It’s been snowing for the past two days. The plumber is probably busy.