HOME SWEET RECYCLED HOME
(Page 2 of 6)
September/October 1972
By Mark Gregory
If you act as your own inspector, there are several quick checks you can and should make on the structural integrity of the home in question.
RELATED CONTENT
To begin with, look for evidence of termites . . . and look hard. The insects eat beams, joists and other timbers away from within and their damage is often completely overlooked (until too late) by people who make casual, walk-through surveys of a building. Go down in the basement (or outfit yourself with coveralls and crawl under the house if the structure has no cellar) and stab the joists and sill plates with a sharp knife or ice pick. Undamaged beams will be solid but your instrument will plunge right through the timbers that termites have devoured from the inside.
Forget any home that has an understructure badly riddled by the bugs. You'll be buying nothing but trouble. If the insects have made inroads into only small areas of a building, however, you can repair the damaged timbers by "scabbing on" or "nail mating" reinforcing beams across the weakened areas after taking steps to insure that the little wood caters leave the house.
Actually, ridding a building of termites without once resorting to poisonous chemicals can be relatively easy. The insects do not fly into a house, nor do they stay in its timbers. They live underground in colonies and make regular forays from the nest to nearby supplies of wood and the other cellulose materials they eat. Interestingly enough, termites will attack only wood that is in direct contact with the ground or that the colony is allowed to build a mud tube to. The insects, in short, must have a protected and maintained entry to the wood (your house) they eat. Remove that entry and you've removed the termites.
Termites are controlled most simply and surely, then, by (1) making sure no wooden portions of a building extend down into the ground, (2) removing all wood, paper and other cellulose matter from under the structure and around its foundation, (3) ventilating all damp crawl spaces and (4) scraping any suspicious mud tubes off the building's masonry or rock foundation.
Your ice pick test may turn up signs of another condition that sometimes damages the timbers of an old house as much or more than termites: dry rot. This is a powdery-white fungus that grows on overly-damp wood and spreads most rapidly in warm climates. If an infestation is mild, the damaged joists, etc. can be removed and/or replaced and the fungus killed by installing ventilators in the trouble spots so that they're no longer excessively humid.
After carefully examining the understructure of your potential house, scrutinize the building's foundation and lower walls for the telltale brown stains of flood marks (which will be more or less horizontal as opposed to the uneven splotches on ceilings and walls caused by seepage through the roof).
Page:
<< Previous 1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
Next >>
