Saturday, August 09, 2008

Knock, knock

Knock, knock.
What's not there?
Isn't that supposed to be "who's there?"
So? What was the last thing about this house that was exactly the way it's supposed to be?
Good point. OK...what's not there?
The old front porch!
Hmm...interesting, but not very funny. Don't quit your day job.

Yesterday I touched up the paint around the tile in the bathroom, then I went into demolition mode. I hauled the last bits of debris from the front porch 'round to the back yard, chopped up some bits of rim joist that had been rotting away in the back yard, and then went to work on the front porch with my sawzall. After working on the media for church, I went back at it today.

The good news is that I got a lot of stuff removed. The bad news is that I need to take out even more, because the termite damage goes beyond the porch itself. The mudsill, the rim joist, parts of the floor joists...I hope it ends soon. I still haven't seen any live termites, but the damage is pretty extensive. And the construction was pretty sketchy in any event. The ledger board that the joists under the porch were resting on wasn't attached to the foundation, just to the joists themselves. So instead of it holding them up, they were holding it up. And not very well, give how rotted stuff was.

Sigh.

2 comments:

Tomas said...

We don´t have termites in Sweden, so I looked them up in Wikipedia.
It seems that it might be as much as 700 kg termites on every person on earth. Given we don´t have them i our country (we have rotten stuff, though), you might find some 2 tons of insects under your house. My advice - dont remove them. :-)

NV said...

That's too bad that there is so much damage. Poor you. Hope it will end soon ... and well!