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July 19, 2005

fixing termite damage

We finally fixed the termite damage that has vexed us for so long.

Last spring (2004!) when we were doing the demolition downstairs, we discovered that termites had eaten much of the structure of the front corner of the house. This freaked us out a little -- we didn't really know how to handle this, and we were intimidated by working on such an important part of what keeps the house standing and everything.

We kind of sat on this for a while and worked on other things. It eventually came to that getting this corner dealt with was holding up work both inside and outside. We tried to hire someone to fix this, thinking that it would be nice to just have done, and that getting to see how an professional approached this would be a good learning experience. A few people that we talked to seemed to regard the job as too small and refused the work. One guy seemed very into the job, but twice failed to show when he had said that he would. We finally accepted that this was our job to do...

From the inside of the house, we could tell that the main corner support was eaten up. This is a massive piece of lumber -- 6"x8" around and running in one piece from the foundation to the roof. An exploratory pulling off of the bottom 2 pieces of siding showed that the sill plate damage wasn't as extensive as we'd feared, but that a few of the other studs were in bad shape. These other damaged studs were behind the fireplace and inaccessible from the inside.

We'd originally planned to approach this from the inside, though I'm not sure why anymore. When it came down to it, we needed to pull the siding to get to the damaged studs.

We ended up pulling 5 or 6 feet of siding so that we could have enough access to the studs. To fix the damaged studs, we cut the stud at a point above the bad wood and removed the eaten portion. We then put good wood in its place and then sistered more lumber across where the old and new wood was joined. This process was made easier by the fact that none of the damaged studs (including the corner!) were carrying any weight; each had been eaten through enough that you could grab it and shake it... The difficult part was getting a level and flat edge on the cut stud.

The sill plate under these 3 studs had to be repaired as well. This was made easier by the fact that it was behind the fireplace, as it was smaller piece of wood here than usual.

We took this opportunity to put insulation up behind the fireplace and to replace the siding that was pulled for access.

This repair took maybe 9 hours. It was easier than we'd anticipated, and it feels great to have this done and to have done this ourselves.

Posted by john m at July 19, 2005 10:24 AM

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