Oxley Woods Living

Today work commenced at about 11:30 on the house, starting with correcting a mistake we noticed last night were an external baton was put in the wrong place, which meant the Tresda couldn’t be properly attached until it was sorted.

Following this, and just completed, the workmen from Wood Newton went up to inspect the window frame and surround in bedroom two at the front of the property, were it appears water may have been entering from any number of locations and has affected the paint and plaster on the inside.

On inspection, and to no great surprise, according to the guys from Wood Newton the problem probably lies with the shoddy repairs we’ve had carried out (twice) on the window frame, which by design are not good enough to keep water out. That, and the fact the frames appear to be separating and coming apart at the joins. Fantastic. The frames have all been filled and repainted quite poorly, but due to weather (?!) the filling and paint is cracking and coming away from the windows and this is, according to the Wood Newton guys, most likely how the water is passing through the frames, and tracking across to the various points it it showing inside the property. That and the fact the frames are themselves separating at the joins in the corners.

They are now moving onto bedroom four, at the side of the house, were we saw a great deal of water coming through at the weekend, to carry out the same basic inspection.

Yesterday we learned a few things and didn’t really have our faith restored in the properties, their design, their construction, or George Wimpey’s (or Wood Newton’s) ability to properly sort things out. The “solution” for the front of the house were had water coming through above the kitchen window in two locations on two walls and ceilings (it is a corner window) was to remove a load of shoddy filler that we’ve been unhappy about since it was put in during December 2008 and then to cover the lower section of house between the ground and first floor windows (including the balcony facade) with Tyvek, stuck in place with their own self adhesive tape, then put the batons in place over the top of the tyvek. The logic behind this is that all rain will go over the waterproof Tyvek Supro material and drop/run away from the property as it should be doing by design anyway. But isn’t.

During the repairs several holes were cut into the house (cores) to check the paper based insulation. Basically the holes were cut through the green Panelvent outer “skin” and sticking in a finger the check the paper is still “fluffy” as it should be. Somewhat to our relief, it appeared to be OK. These holes were then patched over with the Tyvek tape.

To us this does feel like they’re just putting plasters over wounds they can’t heal. Instead of discovering why the buildings let in water, and at so many locations, and actually fixing the “core” issues, they appear to just make every effort to divert the water away from problem areas, even if they’re not 100% certain where the problem areas really are. As an example the water is coming through above the windows. Above the windows has been “fully waterproofed” using apparently very high quality materials (Resistit E SK). Now, no matter where that water is coming from, it shouldn’t be getting through a highly tested, 50 year guaranteed, relatively wide band of flashing material. Nobody could answer why or how this was happening, just that they believed that applying Tyvek to the front of the house would stop the water getting around to those places in the first place and stop the flow of water. Not very reassuring.

As usual we’ve got a tonne of photographs but I’ve not yet had time to view or edit those to share on here.