All Rotten On The Western Front

Originally posted on 2018-09-28

We have had a very interesting few days dealing with some things in the western addition of our property, so much so that I’m not entirely certain where to start.

I have mentioned in a previous post that we plan to move the kitchen to the western part of the building, as well as put in filters to make our water safe to drink. In order to prepare the area for that, we had to look into the water issue we knew was there under the pump tank. Pulling up the laminate floor confirmed what we already suspected, that we had some moisture that we needed to deal with.

So we opened the crawl space access hatch and confirmed the second thing that we suspected, that the crawl space was not insulated. With that in mind, we decided that we were going to completely remove the floor in the west room in order to do the plumbing required for the plumbing and properly insulate the crawlspace to help deal with moisture. Then we started to pull up the floor.

Assuming you read the title to this post, you can guess that we found a little bit of rot. Most of the joists in the north side of the room were very squishy. Some of these joists had been doubled up at some point, indicating that the previous owner realized that there was a rot problem, but they didn’t do anything to deal with the moisture causing the rot and they decided that it would be a good idea to cut out part of the rim joist when they made this repair.

Fun, right? On top of that, the new joists also have rot already, and they seem to be almost brand new boards. So we are going to need to replace some of the joists. Okay, we can deal with that and in doing that we can replace the missing rim joist and everything will be great. At least after we remove the tree stumps we found in the crawl space and take care of the moisture issue.

At this point we did call the building department and had them come by to ensure that our plans for dealing with this were acceptable, and to see if we were going to need a separate permit, as the permit we have was only for moving the kitchen. (We also had to discuss some issues with the septic bed, but that is a post for a little later.) Now, if you are ever in a position similar to this, befriending the people at the building department is a very good thing to do. They said we should be fine to complete this work under our current permit, especially considering we couldn’t give them a full plan until we ripped up the rest of the floor. We then decided to check the rim joist around the rest of the addition.

And that is when we found the rot problem that was in the west exterior wall, mainly caused by the pipe that came through the wall and leaked. Good news, there wasn’t a lot of rot there anymore. Bad news, that’s because the wood that was rotted is gone. Yes, what you are seeing is our west external wall floating, being held up by the wood and nails that attach it to the rest of the house.

Being that this is a structural wall, we needed to at least come up with a plan to deal with this right away. We managed to jack up the wall and we attempted to replace the sill plate, only to discover that our foundation for this addition (which we are certain was built without a permit) isn’t even level. So another call to the building department to have them come by in order to discuss the problem and the possible solutions with them. Fun times, they were not certain how we should go about fixing this either.

Follow-up blog to be posted soon. We are in the process of fixing this and we will let you know once we know if it worked.