Damp external wall
Author
Discussion

Lozw86

Original Poster:

897 posts

155 months

Hi folks,

We have a single storey extension, brick and block cavity wall construction I believe, with a flat roof

The front facade is damp and I'm looking for any thoughts on the cause and necessary remedial works please

I think rain might be penetrating the mortar / bricks along the parapet coping. Should we replace the grey coping bricks with coping stones as pictured at the bottom of my post?

I'm aware that the led flashing is not great, could this be part of the issue? The extension was built by the previous owner.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks

















Replace grey bricks with something like this?..


OutInTheShed

13,114 posts

49 months

Parapet walls are rarely done properly!

wolfracesonic

8,899 posts

150 months

A brick on edge does look nice I’ll admit but a coping is better for protecting the wall underneath from the elements as you allude to. If you do go for a coping, I’d go for one the full width of the wall (13’’?) with an overhang with a drip groove in it; hard to tell exactly from the pic but it looks the lead is falling back towards the blues.
Another thing to check if you alter things is the length of that ‘nicely’ detailed lead, no length should be longer than 1.5 metres, it will crack at some point in the future if it is.
If you want to retain the brick on edge, Google ‘tile creasing’, this can help shedding water away from the tile below.