Speculation on a basement with entirely fake walls

[giftiger_wunsch]

turn the power off to those sockets before you do anything else with the walls

Yeah, definitely. With the level of damp surrounding that socket, I have been avoiding going near it.

On some of the images there appears to be a load of damp issues?

Yeah, I got a 30-year guarantee that the house is damp free, issued 22 years ago, when I bought the place. I'm contacting the company which issued it but I'm fairly certain it's useful only as toilet paper.

 

[giftiger_wunsch]

For the record I had a carpenter do some work elsewhere in the house and while he was there he told me a lot of houses in the area of that age have part-excavated cellars, so I guess when I get chance to look with the borescope I'll probably find there are more permanent walls not far behind them. I'm going to have a damp specialist have a look as well, but if ajstoneservices is correct and these walls really are taped-together fibreboard panels, I'm thinking if I want to make this cellar half-decent I'm going to need to rip out those walls and replace them with plasterboard or something, and have the damp specialists put in damp-proofing at the same time. Guess I'll see what a contractor says. Hopefully this isn't going to cost me too many arms and legs.

 

[mointainwalker]

"Hopefully this isn't going to cost me too many arms and legs."

Man moechte hoffen, dass es keine giftige Entdeckung wird !

 

[Gerrydelasel]

Hopefully this isn't going to cost me too many arms and legs.

If you want it to be a habitable room, not just a store room, then it'll need tanking (that's what the 'damp proofing' solution will be for an underground room). It will cost you an arm and a leg.
If you just want it to be a store room or workshop then simply putting a radiator down there will probably be enough.

 

[giftiger_wunsch]

It will cost you an arm and a leg.

Part of the reason I bought the place was I envisioned the basement being an awesome mancave. If I can afford it at all, I am very keen to make it a nice livable area. Any rough idea what an arm and a leg might mean? I'm bracing myself for a couple of grand; am I underestimating?

I do know that the basement was treated for damp in 1994; the measures they detail involve injecting a waterproof membrane behind the walls. Even if that's now failed over time, that says that someone took at least some sort of measure to damp-proof it, which I would hope means it's not going to cost me too much more than that.

Though having said that, if the walls are as crap as they seem, they may as well have spat on a bonfire.

EDIT: I googled tanking and if I do indeed need to have a full tanking solution put in place, it may well cost me more like £6k. Excuse me while I go slam my head into a wall (or indeed through the wall if it's in my cellar)