Period Drawing Room Restoration

A principal reception room in a period house on East Street: full-height windows, deep moulded cornice, and two walls where the plaster had begun to blow behind the wallpaper.

Finding the cause

The damage was in one corner, and the corner was directly behind four external downpipes. That is the useful clue. Damp appearing in a defined area of a solid wall is almost always water getting in from outside rather than condensation forming within, and replastering without addressing the outside simply resets the clock.

So the external work came first: a section of brickwork roughly one metre wide by two metres high behind the downpipes was repointed, matched to the colour of the existing brick so the repair reads as part of the wall rather than a patch. Once dry, a transparent waterproof sealer was applied to that area to stop the same thing happening again.

Repairing the inside

Internally, the wallpaper was stripped from the two affected walls and the damaged plaster scraped back — not to an arbitrary depth, but until a sound, dry layer was reached.

The walls were then replastered in lime, using the same method and material type as the original. This matters on a solid-walled building. Lime plaster allows the wall to breathe and release moisture; the modern gypsum alternative traps it, and the damp simply reappears somewhere else along the wall. Matching the original material is not sentimentality — it is the only repair that lasts.

Once the plaster had dried, the two walls were finished to match the rest of the room.

Throughout, the furniture was moved and protected, the carpet covered from the front door to the working area, and the room sheeted. On an occupied period house, protecting what you are not working on is as much a part of the job as the work itself.