Beam rot!
Written by julio on August 18th, 2004
This was one of the worst “surprises” along the way. Much of the crawlspace area had been sealed off and had been inaccessible since the house was built in 1911. We found that someone had gotten lazy and left dirt piled up under and against the main beam. Definitely not what you want to find…
The good news was that the the old growth douglas fir that our house was framed with is an incredible wood. It had been sitting against the dirt for 93 years, and it had rotted only about 1.5″ on the bottom edge. And there was no insect damage. If this had been modern wood, it would have disintegrated long ago. When we opened up the back wall of the house, we found a piece of wood from the 60’s that had been chewed to pieces by insects. The adjacent, original stud that it had been nailed to didn’t have a single bite in it. The bugs just aren’t interested in this wood. If they were, the back end of the house would’ve sunk down years ago!
