Don't look under the stairs! A scary story.
Happy Halloween.
This is a scary story. Yesterday, I got a panicky phone call from one of my “happy homeowners.” He has owned since 2001. He has an emergency. He needs a carpenter immediately.
What are your carpentry emergencies? This is his:
He had a mason to the house to do some work to the front steps. The mason came, tore out the steps, and... (Do you know what he found? I did.)
The sill was rotted and needed to be replaced before new steps could be put in.
The sill is a big, thick piece of wood that sits on the foundation. The rest of the house is attached to it. So this trusty piece of wood is holding a lot of weight. As steps age, a gap can form between the masonry steps and the house. Water, snow and ice get into the crack. There’s no light or air flow back there to dry it out. So water sits there, gets absorbed by that overworked piece of wood. The wood rots. Later, the homeowner goes the replace the stairs and, voila! Carpentry emergency!
The sill behind the front stairs is a common area for rot. Finding the problem is not easy; that’s where a home inspector can help. If you have an unfinished basement with exposed sill, it is easy to find. Inspectors poke at the sills and can hear and feel if it is rotted. However, lots of basements have finished areas around the sill. I saw an inspector find a rotted sill by noticing cracked plaster in front of the sill. Another noticed a sway in the door frame from the outside, indicating that the sill had compressed.
Another surprise common to wet sills is wood-boring insect infestation. Wet wood is attractive to termites and carpenter ants. My buyers were lucky that no one was eating or nesting in their sill.
My buyer’s story has a happy ending. I made a couple of calls. I got a carpenter over there and the work on the steps was not held up much.
Houses have a habit of surprising their owners. What surprises have you run into while doing home repairs?
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I had an energy assessment done by MassSave earlier this fall and they recommended a new heating system and attic insulation. They poked inside my walls and said I already had insulation there. So fast forward 2 months.. I was upgrading my 100A panel to 200A and the electrician cut a hole in the wall to put in the new 200A panel (which was twice the size of my old panel). He finds out the "insulation" I had was newspaper dated August 1973! That would explain why this half of the house is so drafty (the other side had blown-in insulation).
Does anyone know if it's worth cutting through every wall to pull out the newspaper and then blowing in new insulation; or should I just leave it the way it is with crumbled newspaper?
The previous owners of our house used packing tape to 'repair' a leak under the sink.
Always ALWAYS look under the stove top or the burners of any stove that isn't absolutely new! A home may look (and smell), spotless but this simple test will tell you immediately how well and how often a home has been cleaned.
Several years ago my husband rented an older condo and, as I was scouring the place prior to moving our belongings in, I found what can only be described as the remains of 20 years of cooking under the burners of the stove. My husband removed the stove top (this was obviously an old stove), and actually had to take a small ax to the two and three inch high hardened piles of crud.
In our house (built in 1929), I started to replace an electrical outlet and once the old one was unscrewed and removed and I could see the wall into which it had been screwed, there was no box behind the outlet, just loose screws. Is that what knob-and-tube wiring means? We do have a box with circuit breakers; we don't have fuses.
Virginia, Northampton
Hi Virginia,
Knob and tube wiring looks like a white ceramic thread spool with two wires running on either side of it. Inspectors have pointed that out to my buyers frequently.
It was not always required to have a box around outlets. Check with an electrician. I wouldn't mess with outlets myself. Someone who knows what she's doing should update the outlet receptacle.
Rona describes Knob and Tube well. Though its theoretically ok, I couldn't sleep well in a house containing it myself.
Something in your story jumps out at me Rona - why are there masonry steps up against a wood sill? Under most situations, this is a recipe for disaster. Masonry wicks water, then the wood rots. Even if the sill is repaired now, it'll probably happen again for the same reason it happened the first time...
I don't really have carpentry emergencies per se, since professional carpentry skills are a necessary part of my skillset. But I get to be the emergency fixer for family and friends sometimes (luckily not that often). Its been hard to get a decent carpenter to do small jobs for a long time, though that may be changing.
This blogger might want to review your comment before posting it.
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