Rising damp in North Hobart, Tasmania

Rising Damp Hobart covers North Hobart and the rest of Hobart. An assessment is an hour or so on site with a meter, inside and out, and it ends with a written explanation of what the wall is doing and why — not a sales visit with a price on the end of it.

Damp in North Hobart homes

North Hobart's terraces and workers' cottages sit tight to the street with very little setback, so the footpath and the front wall are often at nearly the same level. That is the recurring problem here: a footpath resurfaced once or twice over a century has crept up until it sits above the internal floor, and the front room stays damp no matter what is done inside. Terraces add a second issue — a shared party wall means a neighbour's ground levels and drainage can be causing damp on your side of it, which makes the conversation about the fix a conversation with two households.

What the terrain does here

The housing in North Hobart is 1890s–1920s Victorian terraces and workers' cottages and the ground is gentle, built to the footpath. Read together those two facts narrow the possibilities a long way before anyone has touched the wall, which is why an assessor asks about the block before looking at the damage.

None of this would matter much in a hot climate. In Hobart a wall that gets wet in May has until roughly September before the sun is strong enough to do anything about it, so damage that would stay minor further north keeps progressing here.

Arranging an assessment in North Hobart

Before quoting a barrier, any decent assessment checks whether the ground outside sits above your floor level — correcting that is frequently cheaper than anything else on the cost page and occasionally solves the problem outright.

Nearby: New Town, South Hobart, Lenah Valley, Bellerive.