Time, weather, and insects love to eat wood. This will document a couple of repairs.
Windowsills are easy, since the part that rots on these is made to be replaced. Well--mostly. The kitchen casements were an exception, as was the dining room picture window.
1. Remove (if possible), or cut with a hacksaw the screw that goes up from the bottom into the trim on either side.
2. Chip out the bad wood until you reach the dovetail, or if you can, pry out the whole piece.
3. Use surviving pieces to mill a new sill out of pressure treated wood with the table saw. If you don't have good enough pieces to do that, then you will have to guess, and use fit-and-try to come close. Use other sills nearby as a reference.
4. Fit new sill into place and fasten with galvinized nails, like so:
On some of the windows, we had to replace some of the side trim too, but this was just a cut-and-replace deal, since this was a standard profile. I even had some left over from another project (the front door, which I don't have pictures of).
The center post of the garage was a little more involved. To start with, the builder had taken a small shortcut: rather than make a small form and pour a short section of foundation for the center post, he framed and sheathed the post down the footing, about 6" below grade. The garage floor, about 5" deep, was then poured around the post and then out as an apron. While the apron section completely encased the front side, on the back there was an inch gap where the wood was exposed to the sand under the slab.
Since any water flowing down the front of the garage now collected in this well, the wood naturally stayed wet. Ants love wet wood, and had devoured pretty much everything below grade, and were working their way up inside. I had noticed the ants at work here, and a little poking with a screwdriver revealed to me much of what I just related to you. The rest we found out when my Dad and I hacked off the bottom foot of the column with a sawzall(tm), and poked around some more. We pulled off the trim first.
We were left with an approximately 17x9" cavity, six inches deep, with a sort of shelf where the garage floor overlapped the bottom sill of the column. The sill itself was completely gone. About half of the uprights below grade were gone. We broke off the shelf with a couple of whacks with a sledge, and dug out all the debris. A shopvac helped.
Then while I made a quick run to the home center for a couple bags of quick setting concrete, Dad made up a form. When we got back, we bent up a rebar "U", and placed it in the bottom of the well, on a couple of pieces of the old concrete. We sprayed everything down with water so that the new concrete would adhere, then oiled and set the form. I mixed and shovelled the concrete into the form while Dad distributed it and tamped it down to reduce air pockets. Once the form was full, Dad screeded it off with a short sectin of 2x4. I set a bolt in the concrete so we could mount a new sill, and waited for it to cure. This was the point where I started to take pictures. The two 2x3's in the back were wedged under a block nailed onto the post to help support everything while we were cutting away. Since this is an end entrance garage, we didn't have to deal with much of the weight of the roof, at least.
Once the concrete had cured, (about 2 days, since we were using a quick setting mix) the forms were stripped.
I also cut out wood that the ants had eaten. They had made impressive progress, as you can see here.
I then cut some more off the bottom to get two pieces of wood in under the column for a sill. One to go over the bolt (it has a hole to keep it centered) and one just jammed in between that and the bottom of the 2x4's, then nailed to the one below and with the studs toenailed to it.
The removed sections of the damaged boards could now be replaced.
And new trim put on. I elected to add a small trim board at the bottom instead of carrying the clapboards all the way down. Since I had cut back the plywood to this point, I had the option of replacing about 3 inches of plywood, or adding trim. I chose trim. I added a short piece of flashing since I had some on hand, then nailed back on the siding Dad salvaged before we started.
Last updated 11/11/02
© 2002 Glenn S. Lyford, all trademarks etcetera property of their respective owners.