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unexpected rot holes
Tuesday, July 8 2008
The phone wasn't working this morning and I was down in the boiler room trying to determine whether the problem was Verizon's or ours. Then I had to piss, and since I have never stood up to piss in any of the house's flushable toilets in over a year, I went out through the sliding glass doors to piss off the basement guest room's outdoor slab. When I turned to go back in, my attention turned to the bottom of the trim on the outside of the doors. This part of a door has been more noticeable to me since I started replacing the rotten parts of the jams on the sides of the garage doors. What I saw at the bottom of the trim horrified me: it was a hole about an inch and a half across. When I went to touch it, I found that the wood here had rotten completely away. I hadn't considered this part of the house much of a rot risk, since it is sitting on a slab at the top of a slope. But the roof above it has no gutters and dumps its water from a height of two stories onto a hard slab. The resulting spatters have enormous force and had apparently been driven into the woodwork around the bottom of the door, causing it to rot.
Later I came back with a hammer and chisel and removed a nine inch piece from the bottom of the door trim. Behind it the wall sheathing had turned to pulp and the framing behind that was rotten to a depth of a half inch. At one time there had also been trim beneath the door, but I'd submerged it in concrete and stone when I'd veneered the slab with bluestone back in 2004, and now it had rotted almost completely away, leaving nothing but a void in the concrete beneath the door and the treated pine plank it had been nailed to.
In stages, I was able to remove most of the rotten wood (even most of the trim beneath the door, though, since that was accessible only through a 3/4 inch wide slot, I had to break it into slivers with a chisel). After the big chips were gone, I found the void contained a considerable amount of dark brown soil. Was this the decay product of wood? There seemed to be far too much of it to have come from the wood that had rotted, so perhaps it had been lifted up by earthworms or brought in by ants or tiny mammals. In any case, I found it was best removed with a shop vac. My vac's hose was too wide to fit into the space where the dirt was, so I attached it to a length of 3/4 inch rubber hose that had previously carried antifreeze in my solar heat collection system.
To keep water out of this void, I have a plan to insert a plank of treated pine under the sliding doors, overlapping an inch or two of the slab. Then I'll caulk all the voids, replace the rotted trim with pieces of treated wood, squirting spray foam behind these pieces before screwing them in place. And then I'll put gutters on the drip line of the roof two stories above to direct the water away from the slab.
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