Damp shows itself in winter. A wall that looked fine in September starts blooming in January, and by February people have had someone out to look at it and are facing a fortnight of hacking off plaster. Damp proofing waste is one of the more misunderstood loads we take, because it looks like ordinary rubble and behaves nothing like it. Our Waterloo skip hire service covers a good deal of this work through the late winter.
Why this area gets more of it than most
Waterloo has a lot of solid wall property. Terraces and villas built before cavity construction became standard, many of them with no original damp course at all or with a slate one that has failed somewhere along its length. Add a coastal position with driving rain off the water and ground levels that have crept up over a century of paths and drives being relaid, and you have the conditions for rising and penetrating damp in equal measure.
The other local factor is what people did to these houses in the nineteen seventies and eighties. Solid walls that breathed perfectly well for eighty years were rendered in dense cement, or tanked internally, or fitted with gypsum plaster that traps moisture against the masonry. A good proportion of the damp we see behind these jobs was created by a previous attempt to fix damp.
What comes off the wall
A proper damp proofing job means hacking the plaster back to bare masonry, usually to about a metre above the highest visible tide mark, and often across a whole ground floor. That produces a substantial quantity of waste from what looks like a small area, because plaster is thicker and heavier than people expect once it is off the wall and in a heap.
Skirtings come off with it and generally do not go back on, because they have been sitting against a damp wall for years. Floor coverings in the affected rooms usually go too. If the property has lath and plaster rather than modern boarding, which plenty around here still do, you also have the laths, the nails and a hundred years of accumulated dust behind them.
The salt problem and why it matters to the load
This is the part that makes damp proofing waste different. As moisture rises through a wall it carries dissolved salts from the ground and the masonry with it. Those salts crystallise in the plaster as the water evaporates, which is what the white bloom on the surface actually is.
Salt contaminated plaster is not reusable and it should not be mixed into a load of clean brick and concrete that would otherwise be crushed and recovered. It has to be treated as mixed waste. The same goes for any gypsum, and gypsum has to be separated from general waste in any case, which our page on plasterboard disposal and building waste separation explains.
The practical upshot on site is that the plaster and the masonry rubble want to be kept apart. If you are also taking out a chimney or removing a wall as part of the same works, that clean rubble is worth something and the plaster is not. Two piles as you go costs nothing.
Weight, dust and getting it out of the house
Hacked off plaster is heavier than it looks, particularly if the wall is thoroughly wet, and a room’s worth will surprise anyone who has not done it before. For a full ground floor strip an 8 tonne builders skip is the size we would normally suggest.
Bag it rather than barrowing it loose through the house. Rubble sacks filled two thirds full are manageable, they keep the dust down and they do not tear on the way out. Filling them to the top means either dropping one or hurting your back, and neither helps.
The dust from this job is deeply unpleasant and it gets everywhere. Seal the doorways of rooms you are not working in and accept that everything will need cleaning afterwards regardless.
Cellars, and what comes out of them
A fair number of properties here have cellars, and tanking one produces its own waste stream. The old parge coat comes off, sometimes the floor comes up, and if the cellar has been used for storage since the war there is usually a considerable clearance job before any of the work can start.
Cellar spoil is heavy and it is usually damp, which makes it heavier still. If the job involves lowering a cellar floor at all, treat that as a separate exercise from the tanking and talk to us about it specifically.
Permits and access
Waterloo sits within Sefton borough, so a skip on the road needs a permit from Sefton Council at £36 per month, and our guide to skip permits in Southport covers the same authority and process.
A lot of the terraced streets here have no off road parking at all, so the road is often the only option. Tell us the street when you book. Our drivers know most of them and will tell you whether a builders skip will sit comfortably or whether a smaller unit exchanged twice makes more sense.
Local coverage and what happens to the load
We run this stretch daily, covering Crosby skip hire and Blundellsands skip hire alongside Waterloo, and everything comes back to our own recycling centre where a mixed load gets sorted properly rather than moved on. Our environmental and recycling page sets out how that works.
Ring us on 0151 909 6399 and tell us how many rooms are being stripped and whether a cellar is involved. Both change the answer. Our contact page works if you would rather write it down.
