Another Curveball...

Yep.  We call it the house that keeps on giving!  Anticipating a repainting job, I recently took a walk around the house to inspect the stucco and wallboard and see what prep was needed for painting.  In the process, I got out the stepladder to repair a small piece of wallboard just below the second floor deck off of our bedroom.  The piece was hanging slightly loose, so I grabbed a hammer and expected to tap the nails back in.

I soon learned that the wall behind it was really quite soft...and no nail would do any good in it.  While on the ladder, I reached up to grab a support joist from the deck above me.  It was totally mushy...instead of the solid 2x10 it should have been.  I headed into the garage to take a look at the inside of the same wall.  After pulling off some sheetrock, I was greeted by a nasty, wet, rotted pile of framing.  The stud, the wall sheeting and the insulation clearly had been quite wet.  And, as a nice bonus, now it was all crawling with carpenter ants.

A couple of hours of digging later, I had lots of sheetrock removed and found hundreds and hundreds of ants.  What a mess.  One stud of the wall was totally rotted, as was the sheeting between the stud and the exterior wallboard.

Over a few days, I emptied off the shelves in the garage and kept exploring.  The wet rotten mess turns out to span about 10 feet horizontally.  It is about 3-4 feet vertically below most of the sliding glass door to the deck.  At the worst spot, the rotten wood extends nearly 9 feet down the garage wall.

I've now stripped several sheets of wallboard off of the outside of the house and am just about ready to remove all of the rotten lumber and replace it.  I will use a few sheets of plywood to replace what was there as well as rebuilding a portion of the wall.  Once rebuilt, I'll invite an exterminator to leave a collection of poison for the ants in case I didn't get them all.

Oh what fun.  Wait, I still need to paint the house!

Aargh...