Bathroom Waterproofing in Kothrud

Bathroom waterproofing in Kothrud

Kothrud is one of Pune’s older established suburbs, and its building stock is what makes bathroom leakage so common here. Much of the residential area is low- and mid-rise societies from the 1980s through the early 2000s, on tight plots along Karve Road, Paud Road and the lanes between — with a steady layer of newer redevelopment on top.

What we find in Kothrud bathrooms

• Original waterproofing that has simply expired. In buildings of this age the wet areas were often waterproofed to the standards of the day — sometimes little more than a cement plaster lining — and thirty years of use has ended it. The complaint almost always arrives from the flat below rather than from the bathroom’s owner.
• Renovation damage. Kothrud has a very high rate of bathroom renovation, and re-tiling over the old floor is the norm. Each layer lifts the finished level closer to the door threshold, and the membrane under the original screed is usually breached by the new plumbing without being reinstated.
• Stacked wet areas and shared shafts. In dense buildings the bathrooms sit one above another around a common service shaft. A failure several floors up arrives at the base of a wall lower down, and it is routinely misdiagnosed as a problem in the flat where it shows.
• Kitchen backing onto bathroom. A very common plan here, and the reason damp on a kitchen wall so often originates on the other side of it.
• Concealed plumbing in old chases that has been added to repeatedly over the decades.

How the work runs here

We isolate and test the plumbing before quoting, because in buildings of this age a genuine pipe leak is at least as likely as a failed membrane — and it is a much smaller job. Where the membrane has failed, the wet area comes back to the structural slab, is re-tanked and dressed into the drain body, and is flood-tested for 24 hours with the ceiling below watched. In a society we ask the owner below to be present for that test, which settles the liability question at the same time as proving the repair.

See also bathroom waterproofing, waterproofing services in Kothrud and who pays for a ceiling leak from the flat above.