Rot is a winter problem that becomes a March job. Damp gets into a building over the wet months, and by early spring somebody has lifted a floorboard or pulled off a skirting and found something they were not expecting. Dry rot repairs produce a waste stream with one unusual characteristic, which is that leaving it lying about on site is actively unwise. We handle a lot of this work through our skip service across skip hire in Ormskirk and the surrounding villages.
Knowing which problem you have
People use the phrase dry rot for any rotten timber, and the distinction matters because the two behave differently.
Wet rot is far more common and much less alarming. It needs a continuous source of moisture, it stays where that moisture is, and once you fix the leak and replace the affected timber the problem is over. Most rotten window sills, door frames and joist ends around here are wet rot.
True dry rot is the serious one. Despite the name it also needs moisture to get established, but once it has a hold it can spread through masonry and behind plaster to reach timber some distance away from the original damp. That is why the repair is always bigger than the visible damage, and why cutting out only what looks affected is how people end up doing the job twice.
If you are unsure which you are looking at, get it identified properly before deciding on the extent of the work. It is the one call worth making before anybody starts cutting.
Why the waste needs to go promptly
This is the part that makes the job different from ordinary timber replacement. Infected timber carries the fungus, and a stack of it sitting in the garage or under a tarpaulin at the side of the house for a fortnight is a source of reinfection sitting a few metres from the building you have just repaired.
The sensible sequence is to have the skip on site before the cutting out starts, so infected material goes straight from the building into the container rather than into a heap. It is a small piece of planning that avoids an obvious risk.
The same applies to the plaster. Where dry rot has travelled through a wall, the plaster comes off well beyond the visible damage, and that material goes in the skip too rather than being stacked.
What comes out on a job like this
More than people expect. Floorboards and joist ends are the usual starting point, and once a floor is up the extent becomes clear. Skirtings, door linings and sometimes staircase components follow. Where a wall plate or a bressummer is involved, the job becomes structural and needs proper support designing in while the work is done.
Plaster and render come off with it. On older Ormskirk properties that may be lath and plaster rather than modern boarding, which produces a bulky, dusty load full of nails.
Then there is the underfloor void, which on many older houses contains decades of accumulated debris, builder’s rubble left from the original construction, and often a quantity of damp material that has been sitting on the oversite for a very long time. Clearing that out properly is part of the repair, because a ventilated dry void is what stops the problem returning.
Do not burn it and do not reuse it
Two things worth stating plainly. Replacement timber for this kind of repair is pressure treated, and the timber coming out may have been treated at some point in its life as well. Treated timber should not be burned, because what was in the preservative comes off in the smoke.
Nor should any of it be kept for another project. There is always a temptation to salvage a length that looks sound, and with rot the material that looks sound at the end of an affected run frequently is not. Our guide to what you can put in a skip covers the materials in question.
Sizing it
A rot repair is a mixed load. Timber, plaster, rubble from the void and whatever floor covering came up with it. Weight is not usually the limiting factor unless a great deal of plaster or rubble is involved, so size for volume.
For a single room an 8 tonne builders skip is generally right. The difficulty is that these jobs grow. What starts as one floor becomes two rooms once the extent is known, and it is common for the second skip to be needed unexpectedly. Tell us at the outset that it may grow and we will keep the exchange available rather than you joining a queue.
If the work is part of a wider refurbishment, our page on skip hire for home renovations and improvements covers how the phases usually run.
Where the skip sits
A good number of the older properties in the town centre have no off road parking, so the road is often the only option. That means a permit from Lancashire County Council as highway authority at £36 per month, and our guide on whether you need a permit to place a skip on the road in Lancashire covers what is involved.
Position matters here because material is being carried out of a room that may be some distance inside the property. As close to the door as the permit allows.
Local coverage and what happens next
We work out of our own site just up the road and cover the surrounding villages daily, including Aughton skip hire and Burscough skip hire. Everything comes back to us for sorting rather than being handed to a third party, which our environmental and recycling page explains.
Ring us on 01704 779345 once you know the extent of the work, and get the skip on site before the cutting out starts rather than after. Our contact page is there if you would rather write.
