Plaster Clad House Needs Help To Pass Pre-Purchase Inspection

Moisture Probes And RotStop Prepare A House For Sale

The Moisture Detection RotStop team were hard at work recently at a large house with monolithic cladding, needing some help before it can sell.  After failing pre-purchase inspections, the owners decided to pull the house off the market so they could address the problems making the house sales fall over.

During the process of installing moisture detection probes and analysing the timber samples, the house was found to have a number of moisture issues and decay problems.  These arose from poor flashings and guttering, some unsealed windows, and a lot of high ground lines, (where the cladding is too close to, or buried into the gardens or paving).

Those gardens against your walls might look nice, but high ground lines combined with Harditex or Stucco cladding are a no-no because water just soaks up the cladding like blotting paper and wets the framing.

Garden soil level above or close to the cladding looks nice but causes moisture problems

The moisture probe showed that this detail was leaking badly

Timber Treatment Restored With RotStop

Many houses built during 1992 – 2004 were framed using undertreated or even untreated timber, which is not durable enough to resist decay when it remains wet. 

Luckily this house was built using reasonably well-treated timber, but having had leaks and moisture soaking up from the ground for over 20 years a lot of treatment had leached out and decay had been able to start.

We often think that if timber is treated it won’t rot.  Wrong. There are a lot of different treatments and most of them only protect the timber for a limited amount of wetting.  If the timber is fixed directly to damp Harditex or other absorbent cladding, the treatment just gets sucked out of the wood. If the timber is completely untreated, as is the case with many 1998 – 2004 construction houses, decay can set in very quickly.

We have re-treated the framing timber around the bottom plate using RotStop, our proprietary in-situ timber treatment system which kills existing decay and prevents future decay.  RotStop is injected as a foam, into the wall cavities or directly into the studs with our pressure injection system.

You may think you need a re-clad, but when you can find and fix the leaks, then treat your timber to put rot on hold, the re-clad can be put on hold.

A combination of direct RotStop foam injections and RotStop liquid pressurised injections treats the timber

Pressurised bottles of RotStop are left overnight to treat studs

Pre-Purchase Inspector Proof Your Plaster-Clad House

Time and time again we see sales of plaster-clad houses fall over because the pre-purchase inspection raises too many concerns for the buyer or their bank.  This causes much distress to the vendors and many ultimately end up selling for far less than they should have.

The reality is that Plaster-Clad houses are harder to sell, do have the potential ‘leaky home’ stigma attached to them and will sell for less unless you take positive action.

Selling a plaster-clad house can be a very discouraging process for the owners.  As with this house, the sale often falls through at the last minute when the pre-purchase inspection finds a pile of actual and possible problems with the moisture levels, the cladding and the flashings.

On this property, Moisture Detection installed a full moisture monitoring probe system, assisted with general weathertightness repairs and advice about how to reduce risk factors such as lack of eaves and the high groundlines.

If you want to receive the best price for your plaster-clad home, start preparing at least 12 months in advance by contacting Moisture Detection Company to install Moisture Detection Probes and give the house a full “Pre-Purchase Inspection Proofing”.  We find those leaks and high risk issues that put off buyers and help you to resolve them before you go to market, ensuring the best price and no last minute surprises.

If you are worried about your plaster clad house, or just want to be able to sleep at night knowing that your house is safe, contact the experts to find out what is really going on, and what to do about it.

Call us on 09 271 0522

Share This

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fill out this field
Fill out this field
Please enter a valid email address.