Renovations in East Ham

The most common reason anyone in East Ham rings a builder is a wall that will not dry out. The Victorian and Edwardian terraces running back from East Ham High Street North and around Central Park are built in solid nine inch brickwork with no cavity at all, and that construction only works if it is allowed to dry the way it was intended to. Get that right and the rest of an E6 renovation follows easily. Get it wrong and every finish you apply afterwards fails in the same place. GS Renovation starts with the cause, not the symptom.

Why A Solid Wall Gets Wet

A nine inch wall absorbs rain on its outer face and gives it back once the weather changes. Cover it in a cement render or a modern masonry paint and that cycle stops, so water gets in through cracks and then cannot leave. The other usual suspects are just as mundane. Garden levels raised over the years until the path bridges the damp proof course. A cracked hopper or a leaking gutter on the rear addition soaking one strip of wall for a decade. Failed flaunching at the chimney letting water down the stack. Each has a specific fix and none of them is an injection.

Underneath, the ground floor is timber over a ventilated void, and that ventilation is regularly compromised by airbricks that were rendered over, buried when a patio was laid or blocked by debris. Still, damp air in a closed void is what starts decay in joist ends. Our approach is to establish the actual moisture path first, correct it, allow the wall to dry, and only then replaster in a mix appropriate to the background. Replastering before the cause is fixed is money spent twice, and we would rather say so at the survey.

The Rest Of The House, And The Street Outside

Once the fabric is behaving, everything else can proceed in order. Insulating a solid wall internally is achievable but needs proper detailing, because a badly specified lining moves the cold surface behind the insulation and can create the very problem it was meant to solve. Ventilation, extraction that vents outside, and thought about cold bridges at reveals and floor junctions all belong in the same conversation. Structural openings between the back rooms are designed by an engineer we appoint, and Newham Council building control inspects the steel and its bearings before they are covered.

The practical constraints in E6 come from the street rather than the house. Terraces here have no rear vehicle access on most streets, so materials and waste travel through the hallway and out of the front door, and floors and stairs are protected before that starts. A skip standing on the highway needs a permit from the council, arranged in advance, and where parking controls apply the loading has to be timed and short. We plan deliveries in smaller, more frequent loads for exactly that reason, and we sweep the frontage at the end of each day so the street is left as we found it.

Where most East Ham projects start: whole-house refurbishment in East Ham, everything we cover across Newham, renovations in Stratford, renovations in Forest Gate and renovation order of works.