Dr. Strangewood

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mold...

If there's one thing we've learned in our years of renovating this house and the last, it's to expect the unexpected. Actually, if I wanted to avoid lapsing into a pointless cliche, I'd rephrase that to "expect shit to be broken". Oh, I know! Here's an even better one - words to live by, really:

Trust in incompetence, and you will never be disappointed.

Particularly - ESPECIALLY - when it comes to designing sunrooms, apparently.

Oh, by the way: all my readers complaining that there wasn't nearly enough schadenfreud in the last post? Yeah, this one's for you...

We knew when we moved in (have I used THAT particular phrase enough on this blog, ya think?) that the sunroom had some issues. After all, the wood trim on the inside looked worn out, all of the windows in the ceiling had blown seals and condensation between the panes, and there were some pretty big gaps between the windows and the trim on the outside. So it's not like we didn't know it needed work, but still...

This whole mess started when the War Department was fixing one of Frank's botched attempts to run speaker wire out through the walls and to the exteriors outlets and fountain pumps (via sprinkler piping, of course). She couldn't help but notice a fair amount of discoloration on the drywall, the baseboard, and the carpet in the west-most corner of the sunroom. We both figured it was water damage from rain getting in the massive gaps around the window casings and the War Department spent several perfectly good weekend days at the end of the summer carefully caulking the holes with some nasty brown silicon.

Needless to say, it turns out we were wrong. As soon as the weather turned towards fall, the sunroom started to smell distinctly mildewy, and the carpet in that corner was noticeably damp every time it rained. We figured the best course of action might be to just cut away the carpet in that corner and try and keep the concrete dry through the winter.

Given the nature of the house, however, cutting away the carpet was really only the beginning of the problem:



That's... not good. That's very ungood, in fact, for a number of reasons, but let's stick with the fact that there's evidently a lot of moisture in that corner of the sunroom, and leave aside - for now - the fact that the people who built the damn thing apparently didn't remove their wooden forms between pouring the footer and pouring the slab.

To give you an idea of what we're dealing with, here's what that corner looks like from the outside.



You can already tell from the huge crack in the siding (it was slathered in mayonnaise when we first noticed it, but the War Department peeled it off before I could get a picture) that there's probably going to be a water issue with that wall, but take a closer look at the top of that corner where the roof flashing meets the trim:



What the hell? What were the idiots who designed this thing thinking? Where the hell did they think the water was going to go?

Look, I haven't been doing this renovation thing for THAT long, and maybe I've watched more Holmes on Homes than is really healthy, but for Jebus' sake, even I know that's just BAD fucking planning. The water running off the roof is actually DIVERTED right onto the end of the wood! Look at this:



You can probably picture the water coming straight down along beside the window casing and running right off the edge and into the trim all the way along that slope. Where did these idiots think the water was going to go? Did I ask that already? I don't care!

To be fair to the original builders, the sunroom was an addition to the original house. Yeah - keep that in mind as you read the rest of this post: the sunroom is only about 15 years old, as opposed to the 25-year-old house.

Anyway, I refused to start ripping off the trim outside, given that I knew it was going to be a complete shit-show underneath and we hadn't even had dinner yet, and I didn't want to be crawling around trying to make it weather-tight in the dark. So we put off the outside until next weekend, and went to take another look at the inside corner.

I cut back the drywall on the one side, and right about then is when I figured out that we were probably heading right up Shit Creek, and jettisoning all our paddles:



What the...? I don't know that's ants or termites or wasps or what, but whatever it was had long since abandoned it to a couple of pill-bugs and some teeny little ants. Oh, and of course there was more on the other side:



See, the problem isn't really that insects have gotten into the wall, or that there's rain coming in from the roof. The problem is that those ... nests, or whatever, are what's holding up the entire corner of the structure. The dark stain along the bottom on the right side there? That's actually the remains of the sill plate. The tall nest on the left? That's what's left of the jack stud supporting the window. There's no goddamn wood left; it's insects, all the way down.

As an added bonus, this is what the back of the drywall looked like:



Kinda makes my throat tighten up just looking at it. Gross.

We figured that the little drainage ditch of white gravel around the outside of the sunroom was not an original feature. The lawn probably came right up to the walls and the gravel was put in later when the trim at the base of the wall started to rot. We're pretty sure of this because I really shouldn't be able to just push a drywall saw two inches into the sill plate without even really trying:



Rotten to the core.

So I pulled out all the moldy insulation (or as much of it as I could reach), swept up the ants, and sprayed the whole thing down with pesticide to kill any remaining creepy-crawlies. It looks, frankly, like utter shit:



I really don't know how we're going to fix this before winter, or if we should even try. My vote is to wait until spring, and then tear the whole thing down and build it up right.



Maybe Mike Holmes will come by and show us how it's done.