What causes swelling in walls? – DSP 29

Your walls are swelling? Should that be happening? What do I do about it?

Well… in this episode, Graham and Ashkahn discuss the severity of this problem and what you need to do to fix it.

FTS Blog – Gut Your Space Before Construction 

FTS Products – The Construction Packet

Listen to Just the Audio

Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Ashkahn: So, how’s everybody doing? Great. Now I can’t hear you, but I’m assuming you said great. Welcome to the Daily Solutions Podcast!

Graham: The question today is, “I’ve noticed some swelling on my walls in the float rooms where it meets the baseboard. Maybe from water or salt??” “Should I be worried??”

Ashkahn: Oh … Yes.

Graham: Probably. That’s not a good.

Ashkahn: Yeah, you should definitely be worried.

Graham: It’s not a good sign.

Ashkahn: That’s not what walls are supposed to do, is the first thing to know.

Graham: A rare salesman says his walls has created swelling. “It’s probably water and salt,” is the short of the answer giving in there. Probably what’s happening is something has permeated your walls. I assume you have some kind of barrier up there whether it’s oil paint or epoxy paint or something just covering the raw drywall. That has not been enough to stop water from leaching up into it, seeping down into it, or just going through the paint and wearing it out. Now what you’re getting is some beginnings, hopefully, of water damage that’s going in there.

Ashkahn: The thing about this is, the sooner you deal with it, the better your life is gonna be. This is not one of those things you want to ignore. It can range from noticing a patch of swelling and you might just be able to cut that patch out, re-put in fresh drywall. You’ll have to fix the problem, though — why the water is getting in there in the first place. That’s best case scenario.

Graham: It’s a lot like a venereal disease. It’s not gonna get better on its own. You probably don’t want to bring your float tank center around other float tank centers for a little bit of time.

Ashkahn: It’s embarrassing when you start noticing those bumps on the wall.

Graham: If we had doctors, I would advise you to go to the float tank doctor and get it checked out as soon as possible. The faster you deal with it, the better you’re gonna be. There’s obviously an underlying problem ere is that the salt water is getting into your walls in the first place. You’re gonna have to fix that. For the walls itself, if you get to it fast, it’s just about re-patching. If you don’t, then you’re in some trouble cause that stuff can spread pretty quickly, then you start getting moisture and water behind your walls.

Especially if you’re using standard-style drywall. What will happen is you’ll get a lot of mold that collects on the paper backing to that drywall. Not as much in the gypsum material. The paper back there, mold will start to spread inside your walls. It’s a humid environment to begin with, so mold loves it. If it can get a start, then it’s just going to go crazy back there. That’s the sort of thing that you don’t want to have spread or expose your customers to.

Ashkahn: Definitely. Even with the mold and mildew resistant sheetrock that’s out there, if you have wooden studs, it’ll start growing on that too. It’ll get to the studs, and you’ll start finding mold there. Then you’re in a situation where you’re basically going back to the basics. You’re pulling your walls off, you’re spraying them down with bleach. You really have to go in there and do a serious renovation project to deal with stuff like that.

Graham: I should say this isn’t the least common thing that we see or hear about. At some point, if you haven’t even encased your entire room in some sort of waterproof covering, then you’re going to hit this. It doesn’t matter if it’s a few months in, or a few years in. Anything that is below the level of your shower head, at some point, is going to show some kind of water damage in almost any float tank room you have.

Ashkahn: It’s interesting because one of the things we see a lot is people maybe not doing enough waterproofing. It’s almost like right where you stopped this starts to happen. You’re like, “Well, I thought tiling all the way out to this point in the room would be okay.” Then as soon as the tile ends you see swelling in the drywall.

At this point, we basically just surround our rooms entirely in waterproofing. At some point we decided it wasn’t worth it anymore. It’s hard to know exactly where enough is and dealing with it when you under-guess is so annoying. It costs more to overdo it, which is the peace of mind of knowing that your room, which is bulletproof, is well worth it.

Graham: It really is. We started out with showers that were going maybe three or four feet out from where the shower is in each direction. Then you’d start to this. This swelling of the walls about three or four feet out, wherever the tile stopped.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: We’d expand that. Then our walls suddenly went about seven feet out from where the shower is. Then after another year, at the end of those seven feet panels, you’d start to see just a little swelling coming in on the walls.

I should say too, the alternative to actually putting up some waterproof panels, we used unplasticized PVC panels in our rooms to stop the salt and water from getting at our soundproofing beneath that. The alternative is to plan on doing this, when you see the swelling, to go in and cut it out, patch in some more drywall, re-cover it up, redo your baseboards if you need to, and just do this ongoing maintenance in order to keep your costs relatively low and not have to pay the huge bill to surround your entire room in waterproofing.

Ashkahn: It’s very annoying. The mud has to dry, you have to repaint, and all that sort of stuff. It’s not super easy.

Graham: Which means you’re now paying more money for materials again, you’re paying money for labor, and you’re losing yourself money and opportunity cost for not being able to run floats during the construction.

I actually do know centers who plan on doing this. It’s just because they don’t have the extra thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to properly protect the rooms at the very beginning. Then I know some who do this with a plan of upgrading.

To the question that was sent in, f you’re seeing it, you should definitely be worried. You should definitely be going in there and planning on tearing it down. If you have the money, you should definitely consider upgrading as well.

Ashkahn: I will say the other nice thing about overdoing it or having a ton of waterproofing everywhere is it makes cleaning a lot easier. You can clean in a much more unbridled fashion when you’re in there. Just spraying things down You’re not worried about the water bouncing off and hitting this part of your wall that’s not well protected. It lets you go to town when you go in there and clean. That ends up making it faster for you, and your employees. When you’re cleaning up it means you can clean better and it’s generally easier. It has other benefits as well.

Graham: Yeah, for sure. That’s what we’ve cited. All of our rooms now have that. We don’t have any exposed painted walls that are within access of water anywhere in any of our rooms.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: I like to graphically call them, or describe it as, you could murder someone in one of the rooms and clean it up within three minutes and no one would know that a murder had just taken place in there. Right?

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Gruesome, too. Blood everywhere. That’s the goal that you want to — well not the murder part — but where your room is so coated that no matter how much of a mess is made in there, you can clean it up and it’s totally ready for the next person. Easy peasy.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Alright.

Graham: We’re not murderers.

Ashkahn: No don’t — we’re just gonna edit that last part out. Well, there you go. “You should go deal with that,” Is the answer to today’s question.

Latest Blog Posts