Dry rot treatment cost

Most dry rot work in Scottish property lands somewhere between about 800 and 15,000 pounds, and that spread is not evasion. It is the actual range, because the same fruiting body on the same skirting can mean one soft joist end or a floor structure that has been feeding a fungus through a solid wall for six years. The figures below are typical ranges for work of each kind, not a quote for yours.

What follows is where the money goes, so that when you get a quote you can see which job you are being priced for. If two firms are 4,000 pounds apart, it is very rarely the timber that differs. It is how much of the building each of them proposes to open up.

Typical ranges

What actually drives the price

Seven things move a dry rot quote, and they move it by a lot more than materials do.

• Extent. Not the size of the patch you can see, but how far the strands have run. This is the single biggest variable and the only one that cannot be judged without opening up.
• Whether it has gone into masonry. A repair confined to timber is a carpentry job with a fungicide on the cut ends. Once the fungus is inside a solid sandstone wall you are into plaster removal, drilling and irrigation, and that usually doubles a job before any new timber arrives.
• Whether the timber is structural. A skirting is a nuisance. A floor joist, a lintel end, a beam bearing or a stair carriage means temporary support, a different class of replacement timber, and sometimes a structural engineer to sign off the detail.
• Access. A ground floor room with a hatch is cheap to work in. A second floor bay window, a stair void or a cellar reached through a close is not. Time on site is most of the labour cost, and awkward access is simply more time.
• Scaffold. Frequently the surprise item. If the cause is a failed gutter, a hopper or a slipped slate, somebody has to get up there safely to fix it, and that is a separate cost from the rot work itself.
• Whether the cause is shared. In a tenement it very often is, which is the section below.
• Making good and redecoration. Plaster, floor covering, skirting, cornice and paint. Some quotes include all of it, some stop at bare plaster, and comparing two quotes that stop in different places is the commonest way people end up feeling misled by a firm that was not actually being dishonest.

The tenement point, which changes what you personally pay

In a Scottish tenement the roof, the gutters, the downpipes, the hoppers and the common close are shared. If the water that started your dry rot came from a cracked hopper three floors up or a gutter run over the close, the repair to that cause is generally a common repair, split between owners under the title deeds or the Tenement Management Scheme rather than paid for by whoever has the fungus in their ceiling.

That matters to your budget in two directions. It can reduce what you pay substantially, because a 2,000 pound roof repair split eight ways is 250 pounds to you. It can also delay everything, because common repairs need notice, agreement and sometimes a majority vote, and meanwhile the timber inside your flat is still wet. In practice a lot of owners get the internal work quoted separately from the common cause, so the two can proceed on different timescales without either holding up the other.

So when you compare quotes, check which side of that line each item sits on. A quote that bundles the shared gutter into your bill without telling you it is a common repair is not necessarily wrong, but it is a conversation worth having with your neighbours before you pay for all of it yourself.

What a quote has to itemise

If a quote is one figure and one sentence, you cannot compare it to anything and you cannot tell later whether you got what you paid for. A usable quote separates out at least these.

• The cause, what it is, and who is fixing it, with a price against it
• How much timber comes out, in metres or by number of joists, and what goes back
• Which walls are being stripped, drilled or irrigated, and why those ones
• What is being sprayed or brushed on, and over what area
• Temporary support or structural work, if any
• Access and scaffold, separately, so it is not hidden in the total
• Where making good stops, plaster, floor, skirting, decoration
• Drying time, and whether a return visit is included in the price
• The guarantee, its length and what would void it
• VAT, stated one way or the other

Anything on that list which is missing is not automatically a problem. It is just a question. Firms that do this work properly are used to being asked, and the answers usually take five minutes.

When you should expect to pay for the survey

A brief look to establish whether there is a job at all is commonly free. A survey becomes chargeable when it involves genuine work: lifting boards, taking plaster off, moisture readings across a property, tracing a cause, and a written report that names the fungus, the extent, the cause and the recommended work. That sits in the 150 to 400 pound range, and it goes up if access equipment is needed or the property is large.

It is worth paying for in three situations in particular: when a lender or a Scottish home report has asked for a specialist timber report, when you are buying and want the extent priced before you commit, and when quotes you have already had differ so widely that you need an independent view of what is actually there. Many firms credit the survey fee against the work. Ask, because it is usually offered rather than volunteered. There is more on what the visit covers on the dry rot survey page.

Where you can sensibly save money, and where you cannot

Making good and redecoration are the obvious place to save. If you can plaster, or you have a joiner you trust, taking the finishing work out of a specialist quote often removes a meaningful chunk, and it does not affect whether the treatment works. Some owners deliberately leave a floor accessible for a few months so it can be inspected before it is closed up, which costs nothing and is genuinely good practice.

Where you cannot save is on the cause and the drying. Skipping the roof repair to afford the timber repair means paying for the timber repair twice, and there is no version of this where a chemical treatment compensates for a wall that is still getting wet. If the money is tight, deal with the water first and phase the rest. That order is not us being difficult, it is the only order that works.

Compare like with like on the guarantee too. A long guarantee that depends on annual paid inspections and excludes any recurrence linked to a shared gutter is worth less than a shorter one with fewer conditions. Our page onthe guarantee sets out what to look for, and thedry rot treatment page explains what the work involves so you can read a specification and know what each line is for.