Rot and woodworm treatment in Glasgow

The West is where most of this site's rot enquiries come from, and that is not a quirk of who happens to find us. Greater Glasgow holds an enormous quantity of pre-1919 sandstone tenement, sitting under the wettest weather in the Central Belt, with roofs and rainwater goods that belong to everybody in the building and therefore, in practice, often to nobody. Put those three facts together and you have the conditions this trade exists for.

This page is the starting point for the West. It covers what the area actually is in building terms, because "Glasgow" is a poor description of a region that runs from Victorian tenements in Dennistoun to nineteen sixties council-built stock in East Kilbride, and it says where the team travels. If you already know which of the three problems you are looking at, the pages below go straight into what each one does to buildings here.

One region, several completely different building types

The reason a West of Scotland surveyor cannot work from a script is that the next four addresses on the list will be four different centuries of construction, each of which fails in its own way.

Sandstone tenements

The West End, Dennistoun, Partick, Govanhill, Shawlands, Pollokshields and most of Paisley's older core. Solid sandstone walls, no cavity and no damp proof course, with the ends of the timber floor joists built directly into the stone. There is nothing between the joist end and the wall, so anything that wets that wall wets the timber inside it. Add shared gutters and downpipes that no single owner is responsible for and you have the classic West of Scotland dry rot job.

Interwar and post-war semis and villas

Bearsden, Milngavie, Bishopbriggs, Newlands, large parts of Rutherglen and the outer edges of Paisley and Kilmarnock. Cavity walls start appearing here, which helps, but the ground floors are still suspended timber over a ventilated void, and that void is only ventilated for as long as the airbricks are clear. Roughcast render on these houses hides the point where water is getting in, so the first sign is usually inside rather than out.

Post-war council-built housing, now largely private

East Kilbride, Cumbernauld, Castlemilk, Drumchapel, and swathes of Motherwell, Airdrie and Coatbridge. Much of this stock was bought under right to buy and is now sixty or seventy years old in private hands, which means it is reaching the age where flat roofs, low-pitch roofs and non-traditional construction start to leak. Timber content varies enormously between one building type and the next, so what we find here is far less predictable than in a tenement.

New build and recent conversions

Not immune, just different. Woodworm is rare because the timber is treated before it arrives on site. Wet rot around a badly detailed balcony, a leaking shower tray or a flat roof upstand is not rare at all, and neither is decay in a converted mill or warehouse where old timber was kept and built into a new envelope that traps moisture against it.

How far the West actually goes

The team covers Glasgow itself, Renfrewshire, Dunbartonshire, Lanarkshire, Ayrshire and Stirling. In practice that means Paisley, Renfrew, Erskine, Johnstone and Barrhead to the west, Clydebank, Dumbarton and Helensburgh down the river, Bearsden, Milngavie, Bishopbriggs, Kirkintilloch and Cumbernauld to the north, Coatbridge, Airdrie, Motherwell, Hamilton, East Kilbride, Rutherglen and Cambuslang to the east and south, and Kilmarnock, Ayr and Stirling at the far edges.

The East of Scotland is a separate team with a separate patch, so if your property is in Edinburgh, the Lothians, Fife or the Borders you want that half of the site rather than this one. We would rather tell you that now than take an enquiry we cannot serve.

The three problems, and where each one turns up here

• Dry rot is the one that travels, and in Glasgow it is overwhelmingly a tenement problem: failed rainwater goods, wallhead gutters, bay window structures and the close itself.
• Wet rot is commoner and usually cheaper, and here it lives under suspended ground floors where the airbricks stopped working years ago.
• Woodworm shows up in tenement floor voids and roof spaces, and turns up constantly in the high turnover rental stock of the West End and Southside.

If you cannot tell which you have, that is normal and it is not something to apologise for. Start withthe difference between wet rot and dry rot, or book a timber survey that covers all three in one visit.

How an enquiry works

1. You tell us what you are looking at. The form takes three questions and "I am not sure" is a perfectly good answer to the one about which problem it is.
2. A survey is arranged. Somebody comes out, opens up enough to see what is actually happening, and works out where the water is coming from rather than just where the damage shows.
3. You get it in writing. What was found, what caused it, and what putting it right involves, in a form a lender or a factor will accept.
4. Then, and only then, a price. If the honest answer is that the timber is sound and nothing needs doing, that is what the report will say.

The shared repair problem, in one paragraph

It deserves stating up front because it catches out almost every first time tenement owner in the West. The thing causing your rot is frequently a gutter, a hopper, a downpipe or a roof that is common property under Scottish tenement law, which means the repair is not yours alone to commission and the cost is split across the flats in the building. That changes the timeline more than it changes the technical work. TheGlasgow dry rot page goes into what that means in practice, including what you can do while the shared side is still being argued about.