Sills of the East Side

Woody and his crew have moved around the house to the east side, which is -- I hesitate to say this because I might jinx it -- the last side of the house to be restored. (The back of the house being new construction, it needs no restoring.)

While his guys work in the "field" of the wall applying epoxy and filling nail holes, Woody has started addressing the windows. The windows on that side of the house had substantial dry rot from some bad caulking work (done by modern painters) and a few generally dumb design decisions (made by Mr. Holt).

One issue was that the windows were leaking during construction, so the general contractor's carpenters "fixed" them by adding a slope to the sills. That didn't actually fix the issue, unfortunately, but Woody thought he might be able to just add wood on top to fix them.

This turned out not to be the case.

Here's the sill of the window in the front bedroom (Bedroom 1), in the process of being removed. You can see the extensive wood rot that we are dealing with here.

Fortunately the rot appears to be confined to the sill itself, and the rest of the framing is pretty good.

Woody will go get some wood tomorrow to make new sills. The main reason why cutting away part of the wood didn't stop the leaks is that that's not where the leak was coming from.

And in the back bedroom, here, you can see more wood rot, though to be fair this looks worse because it is right next to a white wall.

The is the underside of the outside of the sill, which is not in good shape at all.

And here's the actual culprit for the leak: water was getting into the pockets of the windows, and the trim was caulked at the bottom so it could not flow back out. So it would fill up the pocket and overflow into the house. Woody is now treating these with epoxy and will fill in the holes the water was getting in through, while leaving the drainage path in place.

posted by ayse on 04/16/18