Misted glass
and overflowing
gutters.
Two of the most common things a survey flags, and two of the cheapest to put right. Both are usually quoted as bigger jobs than they need to be.
You do not need
new windows.
Condensation between the two panes of glass means the sealed unit has failed. The gap between the panes is meant to be sealed and filled with dry air or argon. Once the perimeter seal goes, damp air gets in, and every cold night it condenses on the inside of the glass where you can never wipe it off.
The important point is that the frame is a separate thing from the glass. A failed unit is a glass problem, not a window problem, and the sealed unit can be measured and swapped while the existing frame stays exactly where it is. Replacement window companies rarely lead with that.
It is worth doing rather than living with, because a misted unit has lost its insulating gas fill along with its seal. It is no longer performing thermally, so it is costing you on heating as well as looking poor.
On timber sash windows the equivalent problem is different: the putty or bead fails, water sits in the rebate, and the bottom rail starts to rot from the inside. That one does need catching early, because once the joint has gone the repair moves from glazing to joinery.
Most internal damp
starts outside.
A blocked or split gutter does not look like an emergency. It is one of the most destructive things on a house, because it delivers water to one spot on the wall continuously every time it rains.
Look at the wall under a joint after heavy rain. If there is a dark vertical stain, or moss and green growth running down, that wall is being soaked repeatedly. Solid brickwork that stays saturated stops drying out between showers, and then the damp appears inside on the matching internal wall. People replaster that internal wall, the damp comes back, and nobody looks at the gutter.
Cast iron gutters on older London properties fail at the joints rather than along the run. The bolt corrodes, the joint opens, and it drips. That is a repair, not a replacement, and it is worth repairing rather than swapping cast iron for plastic on a period elevation.
Downpipes matter as much as the gutter. A downpipe discharging onto the ground rather than into a gully puts the water straight against the base of the wall, which is one of the commonest causes of what gets diagnosed as rising damp.
Rot hides behind
the guttering.
The fascia is the board the gutter is screwed to. If the gutter has been leaking at the back for a few years, the fascia behind it is usually wet, and soft timber will not hold a gutter bracket. Rehanging a gutter on rotten fascia is a repair that fails within a season.
Soffits, the boards underneath the overhang, are where wet rot tends to be found because they are shaded and slow to dry. It is one of the few defects a homeowner can verify from the pavement: look up at the underside of the roof edge and see whether the paint is intact or whether the timber is dark and open grained.
All of this shares one scaffold with the roof, the chimney and any pointing to the upper elevation. That is the single biggest saving available on this kind of work, and it is worth planning the whole roofline as one visit rather than calling different trades in different months.
What your report
probably said.
On glazing, reports usually say a number of double glazed units are misted or blown indicating failure of the perimeter seal, and recommend replacement of the affected units. That wording is specifically about units, not windows.
On rainwater goods, common phrasing is gutters were not tested under working conditions, or the rainwater goods require clearing and the joints resealing, or deteriorated sections should be replaced. Surveyors inspect in dry weather and cannot see a gutter perform, so they hedge. If your survey says this and you have a damp patch on the same elevation, the two are almost certainly connected.
If external joinery is mentioned in the same section, expect fascia and soffit work to sit alongside the gutter repair, because they are the same access and usually the same underlying cause.
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