We are a referral service, not a builder. That distinction is the whole point of us.
Rising Damp Perth is a lead referral service. We connect Perth property owners with independent damp specialists registered with the Building Services Board of Western Australia. We do not carry out the work ourselves.
We exist because rising damp is one of the few building problems an ordinary owner cannot name. People can see a wet band on a wall and have no idea whether to ring a plumber, a painter, a bricklayer or a builder. Most ring a painter, and the paint comes off again the following winter.
Perth's older suburbs are built from what was underneath them. Limestone quarried locally went into Fremantle, Cottesloe and Claremont; double brick took over from about the 1900s and still dominates the inner ring. Both are porous, both sit on sand, and a great many of them were laid with no damp-proof course whatsoever — the practice did not become routine here until well after the Second World War.
Sand drains beautifully until it does not. Through a Perth winter the water table under the older river and coastal suburbs rises close to the surface, and a wall standing in damp sand behaves like a wick. The moisture climbs until the rate it evaporates from the wall face matches the rate it arrives, which is what sets the height of the tide-mark.
Salt is the second half of it. Groundwater carries dissolved salts up into the wall and leaves them behind when the water evaporates. On the coast, more salt arrives on the wind. Those crystals expand as they form, and that is what blows render off limestone and crumbles the face of a brick — the water moves it, but the salt does the damage.
We do not publish reviews we did not receive, before-and-after photographs of work we did not do, or a fixed price for a wall nobody has looked at. Every figure on this site is a range, and the range is honest about how wide it is.
Building work in Western Australia is regulated by the Building Services Board. We only refer specialists holding the registration appropriate to the work they carry out, and you are entitled to ask to see it.
Rising Damp Perth