Bram Toussaint

Whatever you do, don't lift and re-lay them tight in January. People do this and then in July the boards have nowhere to expand and they cup or lift at the edges. If you ever do re-lay, do it in a damp month.

Measurement mic and free room measurement software costs about the price of a takeaway and turns all of this from guesswork into a graph. Worth it before you buy any treatment, so you're treating the actual problem.

Flexible filler is the wrong material regardless. On plaster you want either a proper plaster filler or, for anything wider than a hairline, scrim tape and a skim. Flexible fillers stay softer than the surrounding surface and telegraph every movement straight through the paint.

Seasonal, on an internal wall, cold spot, near a kitchen — that's condensation, not rising damp, and injected damp proofing will do nothing for it because there's nothing rising. Save your money.

What's happening is that spot is colder than the surrounding wall, so moist air from the kitchen condenses there first. Cold spots on internal walls usually come from something structural behind it — a chimney breast, a solid section, a bridged cavity, or a gap in insulation on the other side.

Diagnostics that cost almost nothing: a cheap hygrometer in the kitchen and the affected room, and an infrared thermometer to map the cold area. If the kitchen is regularly above 65% relative humidity you've found half the problem. Rising damp also doesn't do 60cm circles on internal walls, it does a horizontal tide line — the shape alone rules it out.

There's your answer then. A decent extractor ducted properly to outside, run during and for 20 minutes after cooking, plus a closed kitchen door, will likely make the patch disappear. That's a couple of hundred quid against a four-figure damp proofing quote for a problem you don't have.

This is the answer people skip past. Most sampled kicks have a clear pitch and it's usually somewhere around F. On a track in F sharp everything gets muddy for reasons that look like an EQ problem and aren't.

Careful with the self-adhesive foam tape approach, which is what most people try first. It works for one winter, then the adhesive fails, the sash sticks to it in summer, and you're picking gunge off the beading. Brush pile in a groove lasts decades.

It's a defensible choice with a test report behind it. Without the report you're guessing, and that's the part I'd spend money on first.

Rubber sheathed lighting circuits are the one thing here that genuinely needs to go — the insulation goes brittle, cracks when disturbed, and the failure mode is a short or a fire rather than a nuisance. So the lighting rewire isn't optional in any sensible version of this.

Whether you do the sockets depends entirely on what a proper test says, not on how they look. Get an EICR from an electrician who isn't quoting for the work. It gives you insulation resistance readings, earth continuity, and a list of coded faults. 1980s PVC in good condition can easily have another 20 years in it; 1980s PVC that's been buried under insulation or run without earths at the lighting points is a different story.

The usual answer for a flat you're keeping ten years is: rewire lighting, replace the consumer unit, keep tested-sound socket circuits, and accept a bit of extra making-good cost later if you ever do the rest.

Mild dissent: if your current monitors are genuinely bad — cheap ported plastic things with a hyped bass bump — then treatment won't rescue them, because you'll be treating a room to accurately reveal an inaccurate speaker. What have you got? That changes the answer.

Then they're fine and treatment is the right call. That tier is honest enough that the room is definitely your limiting factor.