I’ll just show you what’s going on in here. The lathe is over here. A friend is going to pick this up coz I’m just not using it enough. A lot of stuff has been moved. There’s an empty box and I’ve just noticed this sign. Warning! FRAGILE “THANK YOU” That’s one way to get your parcel kicked around a bit. That fell off. There’s glue on that. Stuff is all over the place. Boxes and everything that was on the floor is up. Luckily this corner here didn’t have any damp problems. The main problem is all over there. And around there. You can see I’ve drilled holes just to help air circulate for now. In fairness we were aware of the problem. There’s more holes drilled back there. I actually moved the wall forward. You can see there I moved forward just so I had a clean surface to work on. And air could circulate around the back. The problem here though does come from that wall there. The leaks from up there had been sorted out quite a while ago. But I think they’ve got some subsidence outside on that side there and water congregates when it’s rained and it must have found a way in. I think the lady who had the studio over there even had some shrooms growing. I poured a bit of bicarbonate of soda down there. Supposedly it’s good for getting rid of smells so hopefully it will get rid of the mushroom smell. I’ve been treating the timbers with this stuff here. This is what police officers get reincarnated as. Kills, Protects, Preserves. Wood treatment, triple action. It says it treats wet rot, treats dry rot, penetrates deep into wood for long lasting protection, kills all wood-boring insects, their larvae and eggs. I had to buy this. I’m not endorsing this product. It’s the first time I’m using it. It sprays well. I’m using this pressurised canisters to get the nozzle really far in to spray the areas I haven’t exposed yet. So hopefully I never have to expose them. Ok I need to cut some more floorboards up and I got one of these. Grrrrr. In the end the excavation became a lot larger. I decided to get rid of as much of rotten material as possible. Or more to the point, as the de-humidifer started to work and the timber started to dry out there was a lot more rotten timber than I first suspected. I might have explained the situation here in a much older video but the guys and I are renting off a developer via a charity which provides artist studios, paying peppercorn rent with the full knowledge that at some point the developer will want us gone so they can build fancy flats. We really didn’t think we were going to be here as long as we have. Essentially it’s every six months we think we’re going to leave. So before some has a go at me for not doing a proper job – there’s no point if you expect to be gone in 6 months and the building your in is going to be torn down. Anyway the damp problem has been on going, but was first noticed by our partners who would comment on a musty old book smell when we had been in the workshop for a while. It wasn’t old book… it was damp fungus. This stuff is fucking everywhere. I think I just need to rip out the skirting board as well. There’s not point having it around this corner. So this is the new excavation. It’s a little bit bigger. You can see a lot of mould on that wall there. It’s really damp. I ended up having to cut a lot more of the joists out. There is a carpet of mould on the ground level, which I later scrapped out with an oar. I don’t have a shovel but I had some oars from a boat project me and the guys got up too some years ago. I used the infrared night mode on the camera to see how far it has spread. This entire building is a bit ridiculous. Really old houses in the UK were designed to be permanently ventilated – so when people try to prevent heat from escaping they actually restrict the air-flow and at high tide, the moister feeds the mushrooms. I can’t believe they’ve actually put the wire across there like that. How someone fitted an extra joists there anyway? I think they must have just doubled it up because it wouldn’t got across. There’s still a bit on the floor. We’ll just scrape that out. I realised that drip we’re hearing is literally a drop of water being taken out of the air about ever second. It’s crazy isn’t it. Ahh the floor here looks a bit fungal. Aaaargh. Oh that’s the cable. I put down bicarbonate of soda on the ground, along with spraying a chlorine based anti-fungal spray. Arisskarp on instragram suggested using Sodium percarbonate (oxygen bleach) but coz I already put chlorine based bleach down the two couldn’t mix – in case I created chlorine gas and re-ennacted a first world war trench attack. I painted the door frame with wet rot hardener. Later I painted the wall up to the window with aluminium paint. That’s meant to help timber resist wet-rot as well, so it’ll be alright for the walls. And it looks pretty cool. It looks like the terminator just exploded in the corner. Also the smell of the paint has helped mask any residue mushroom smell.

So I’m just going to carry on getting these cut and then I’m going to paint them. I’m going to leave a gap between everything just so I increase the airflow as much as possible. Make sure you read the COSH sheets for any chemicals you are using when doing a job like this. Along with having to be careful I didn’t cut in the cable earlier, I had to also be careful not to cut into the cable earlier but also not to get any of the treatment on the wiring. We’re just using OSB board to cover up in the end. No point paying for anything else. There’s enough glue in this stuff so it will keep the mould back and help resist against moisture. Maybe it needs more. That’s all we got. Oh right. Try go for the edges of everything so it soaks in a bit. I think this stuff has a bit of a coating on the faces. Oh right. Should try to lean them a bit. The main thing is we’ve exposed lots of air gaps around the sides which will help air flow– hopefully I don’t drop any small parts down.

Going to install a permanent huminidfier at some point, we’ve saved the charity some money doing the work ourselves – they only need to cover material costs. I had a good suggestion to feed the exhaust from the extractor under the floorboards so dry air goes in. I could add a bit of ducking from another end of the workshop to a bathroom extractor fan pumping air outside.

Anyway that’s wetrot vs workshop. I think we won but it was an great expense to valuable time. So now my Christmas special is behind schedule.