Plumbers & electricians in Faversham

The town sits at the head of Faversham Creek, which runs off the Swale, and it grew along the water and along the old Watling Street that still comes in through Ospringe. The centre is medieval in plan and very mixed in fabric. Abbey Street has been called the finest medieval street in the south east, and a good deal of what reads as Georgian along it is a fifteenth century timber frame with an eighteenth century front put on the outside of it. Around five hundred buildings in the town are listed, most of them inside a conservation area that takes in nearly all of the old centre.

Then there is the working town. A brewery founded in sixteen ninety eight, explosives works out on the marshes until the end of the First World War, and streets of small Victorian cottages put up for the people who worked in both.

Outside the town ME13 is farming country and it is spread very thin. Oare sits across its own creek with the marshes past it. Boughton under Blean and Dunkirk string out along the Canterbury road under the Blean woods, Hernhill and its hamlets sit in the orchards above them, Selling is off south east near the railway, and Graveney lies out on flat ground towards the coast. The stock out there is cottages, weatherboard, farm buildings that became houses, and a great deal of lath and plaster.

Why a leak in an old Faversham house shows up in the wrong room

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In a house built since the war the plasterboard is screwed to studs and there is not much for water to follow, so a leak tends to appear more or less underneath itself. Find the stain, look up, and you are usually within a foot of the fault. A timber framed building does not behave like that at all. The frame is continuous. A sole plate runs the length of a wall, a bressummer carries the floor above, joists run into it, and every one of those timbers is a channel. Water that gets out of a pipe wets the nearest piece of wood and then goes where the wood goes, along the grain, along the top of a beam, down the side of a stud, across a floor and out at whatever gap the frame leaves it. Lath and plaster makes it harder again, because lime plaster and hair soak up damp and pass it sideways instead of blistering in one neat circle the way modern paint on board does. The laths are thin timber strips with gaps between them, and the plaster forced through those gaps has set into nibs behind the wall, so damp has a run of wood and a run of keyed plaster to move along before it ever reaches a surface anyone can see. So the stain spreads slowly, arrives late, and sits wherever the frame let the water out, which in these houses can be a room away and a floor down from the pipe that is leaking.

What the owner sees is a patch on a hall ceiling with only a bedroom floor above it, or a skirting going dark on the far side of a chimney.

Because of that, cutting into the first damp patch you find is usually the wrong first move in these buildings, and in a protected one it is also the most expensive. The honest method is to work from the water side rather than the stain side. Establish what was running when the damp appeared and what was not, shut off and isolate in sections, watch a meter with everything closed, bring one outlet back at a time and wait on it, and only then open up, in the smallest place that proves the point. Sometimes a lifted board at the end of a joist run settles it at once. Sometimes the frame is boxed in and plastered over and there is no small opening to be made, and then it depends on the property and on what may be disturbed, which is the owner’s decision and not one to take on the spot with a bolster in your hand.