ᐅ Screed installed three days ago and still damp?

Buchsbaum schrieb:

Right now, in summer, the humidity is naturally very high. This makes drying difficult.

I keep pointing out the huge amounts of water introduced into a house with plaster and screed. I have always done it in stages because otherwise, too much water would have entered the house.

When interior plaster and screed are applied, several thousand liters (several hundred gallons) of water enter the house and the masonry. One should be aware of this.
And this moisture needs to be removed slowly. No matter how much you ventilate and heat, it simply takes time.

I definitely wouldn’t want a painter or drywall installer in the house at that stage.

Thanks for the explanation, I see it the same way. The site manager wants to call in the drywall installer already after 1 to 2 weeks of drying time. We don’t want that either.

In your opinion, when is the right time for the drywall installer to come?

Buchsbaum schrieb:

Roughly estimated, I would say that for a house with 150 sq m (1,615 sq ft) of living space, the interior plastering plus screed uses about 15,000 to 20,000 liters of water. That’s quite incredible.

Yes, our house is about that size too. How long should we allow for drying time before starting work on the walls? I’ll check now when our interior plastering was done; I think it was at the beginning of June. The screed was done three days ago.

You can’t really give a general answer to how long something takes to dry.

It depends on the weather and the conditions. Of course, it also depends on the thickness of the plaster layer and the type of plaster itself. Gypsum plaster requires significantly more water than lime-cement plaster. Especially the gypsum boards used in drywall construction tend to absorb moisture.

If the moisture level inside the house is too high, mold will quickly start to form and unpleasant odors will develop.

Even if the plaster feels dry on the surface, I would recommend drilling a small hole in the wall occasionally to check how damp the masonry is inside. You can tell if the drill dust from the hole is moist.

The drywall installer should only start work when everything is dry. That’s why they are called drywall installers.

Drying takes longer in summer than in winter, but I would still wait about 2 to 3 months.

Let's keep things realistic. Nobody waits several months. And you don’t need to remove the suspicious thousands of liters either, most of it will be absorbed.

The painter will know if the surface is ready for their coatings. The drywall installers as well. Just communicate directly with the trades if the site manager is unavailable.

In the past, people used to say that a shell construction needed six months to dry out. That was back when craftsmanship was still reliable.
Nowadays, construction timelines are less about building physics constraints and more about financing.

So, it can happen that a house is completed in three months. Those who find solid construction too slow simply opt for a prefab house. But that can also go wrong.

A good friend of mine flew on vacation the very day his house was being assembled. It was November, and it rained continuously. During the assembly, the whole place flooded, the wood got soaked, and after a few months, the entire house warped, the tiles cracked, and in the end, the construction company went bankrupt. But at least he had a nice holiday. Naively, he even paid the builder the remaining balance shortly before Christmas, even though the house wasn’t finished yet.

A €50,000 (about $55,000) loss.

Anyway, today there’s an expert, assessor, construction supervisor, inspector for every little thing, and they all claim to know a lot.
Sure, sure, out of 20,000 liters (5,300 gallons) of water, 18,000 liters (4,750 gallons) remain trapped inside the house. I guess I picked the wrong profession.

Whatever your profession is, maybe you could look into how concrete cures and what happens chemically during the process. Concrete in its pure form is just cement mixed with water. Concrete does not dry; it hardens through a chemical reaction, and yes, the water is mostly chemically bound in the process. Now you can also understand why, for example, floor slabs are watered and covered during summer.

Nowadays, curing is faster due to additives. Six months is nonsense nowadays.