Old Termite Damage in Load Bearing Supports in the Basement

On Thursday, after my cousins left from a day of helping tear down drywall in the basement, Ted and I cleaned up the area of all debris and took a closer look at what we had uncovered. We'd removed most of the drywall from the ceiling and along the center load-bearing wall. Some stretches of the center wall had drywall on one or both sides of the studs. Along other stretches, the walls are made of tongue and groove boards; those we left in place, because they look kind of neat and we'll try to incorporate them when we finish the rooms.

This is the tongue-and-groove wall after the drywall boards were removed.

This is the reverse of the same tongue and groove wall, which is part of Ted's office. I'll clean it up and paint it a better color, but it's actually pretty neat-looking and rustic, so we're leaving it. The reverse side will get drywalled again.

Here's what we have for the studs themselves. There are several large, load-bearing supports and several two-by-fours (actual 2x4's, and not the 1 1/2 × 3 1/2 modern boards) running the entire length. While the load-bearing studs are probably original, the other studs may not be. These have what looks like marks from an old lathe wall, but the marks are facing every which way, not outward, as you would expect. I suspect they were salvaged from somewhere else--another building, another room, who knows? Or is it possible that when the house was built in 1925 (or '26 or '28) they used reclaimed lumber?

This was part of a non-load-bearing wall built between the mechanical rooms. Because it's a two flat, each unit has its own boiler and hot water heater. We plan to remove these studs and create one room for the mechanicals. But note the old lathe marks; there was no lathe or plaster here, just oddball pieces of drywall nailed up, and the marks fall on all sides of the wood, indicating it was probably salvaged from elsewhere.
The wall itself was built over a drain, and sort of floats there, hanging from the ceiling. It was kind of like a curtain between the rooms.

Now, when we refinished the floors on the first floor unit, we found and replaced several boards with what looked like very old termite damage. There didn't appear to be any damage to the subfloor, just the floorboards themselves. We did a cursory check below, removing a few drywall ceiling boards in the basement, but didn't find anything. Still, we suspected we might find some evidence of an old infestation when we tore out the wallboards and the rest of the ceiling.

Oh boy, did we ever, and it covered a wider area than we anticipated. There are shallow tunnels on the surface of the studs and a few of the cross beams and joists. As far as we can tell, it's pretty much on the outside surfaces only. Peeling the chewed up layer away reveals solid hardwood directly below in all areas tested. But it does look scary. I spent an hour googling and looking at photos of such damage, and in most cases it seems people just put on a wood hardener or filled the studs with epoxy if the damage was only on the surface, or added a few support beams.

All of the termite damage is to one side of the beams, the south side, and is very shallow. Scraping off the surface reveals undamaged hardwood.

Some previous owner in the past was aware of the problem, because one beam already has some support pieces nailed to the side, and these are undamaged.

Now, the drywall that was on this section was not in clean, full-sized sheets as you would imagine. Rather, it was a patchwork of small pieces--some only 2x2 foot square--nailed down with a billion nails and--get this--taped with masking tape rather than standard tape and mud and then painted over. Cah-razy. A few of these pieces had the old US Gypsum Corporation label on them, with a copyright date of 1924. (Our house was built somewhere between 1925 and 1928). Because of the patchwork craziness of the drywall pieces, my guess is that they may have been salvaged from elsewhere, too. So we really can't use the copyright date as any indication for when this wall might have gone up, although there was a ton of black coal dust and crap behind it, so my guess is that it was a long time ago, probably even before the last set of owners, who had been here for forty years. My theory of the day is that a long-dead previous owner discovered the infestation, tore down whatever wall covering might have been there, dealt with the problem, and either used the old drywall pieces he pulled down in a new quilt-like configuration, or put up random pieces he found elsewhere.

So, gentle readers, what are your overall thoughts? Our plan is to put down drywall, and leave the studs as they are. There doesn't appear to be dry rot in any of the supports, and the termite damage, like I said, only looks cosmetic and pretty ancient and only on the surface (and only on the south side of any of the pieces).

Anyway, our inspector has an open door policy, and I'll probably bounce the question off of him and see if he thinks we should get a termite inspector in, even if it's old damage. I was just wondering if anyone else out there in House Blogger Land has had a similar scenario.

But seriously, the house has stood for 80+ years, I'm not terribly worried. But better safe than sorry, they say.

Basement Discoveries, The Good and The Bad

We celebrated our one-month anniversary at The Box House this week with a fun activity we like to call Garbage Night. Each week, we bring up another load of left-behind junk from the basement and try to figure out what to do with it. Here's the garage, a.k.a. The Staging Area:

Most of what's there is junk, pure and simple. We'll recycle the cardboard boxes, and our friend Andy is coming by sometime to get the old radiator cover. And those two wooden chairs, which I thought I'd eventually rehome, I've decided to keep instead. They are solid oak and if I refinish them and put on new seats, they'd be cute little chairs for...somewhere in the house. But the rest of the stuff? I don't know. The old wooden Krakus ham crates are a little too far gone for me to want to save, and nobody came a'running when I offered them for free. I won't feel too guilty chucking them, because at least wood is biodegradable. But there's lots of other crappy furniture and fixtures that we don't want and apparently no one else does, either. So that all gets shoved to a corner for one giant Salvation Army pickup sometime this summer.

I know I've complained about it before, but it is very frustrating to have to find time to deal with this when all I want to do is start working on the house. I'd rather spend time assessing the overall structure and creating a priority list of projects than deal with this stuff.

Still, there have been a few pleasant surprises in the basement, such as fragments of one of the original stained glass windows. I think most of, if not all of it, is there. We're not exactly sure where this would have been originally. It matches the piano windows in the first floor unit, but does not fit any of the dimensions of the current windows. My best guess is that it might have been for the stairwell window, falling halfway between the first and second floor. In any case, I want to try to find a stained glass art class to either restore this to hang in a window, or create a light box for somewhere in the interior.

One of two piano windows in the first floor living room.

Here's a not-so-pleasant discovery. We took down the grotty ceiling tiles in the storeroom under the front stairs and found evidence of past termite damage. The mud tunnels are what they travel through; if you brush them away, you can see there is damage to the wood. We had found some damaged boards in the dining room, which were already replaced, and recently found one in the stairwell landing--just on the other side of these boards in the photo--that is also damaged. (The part about this that irritates me is the sanding guys must have spotted that one, too, and chose to stain it anyway rather than tell us it was partly hollow at one end.) The mud tunnels are random, and only extend for a couple of feet. It does not look like anything current is going on and we haven't found any insects anywhere in the basement, except for the occasional spider. Still, I'll need to research this more. Unless they came in with the wood, which is quite likely, they somehow managed to get into the house before. I don't want that happening again.

Here's a great discovery--the original kitchen doors for the units upstairs. They are swinging doors that must have been removed when the kitchen was tiled. We'll be reinstalling these when we do the kitchen remodels, whenever that will be. (Boy, I need a haircut. Um. And maybe some makeup.)

A bad discovery. The brick underneath the windows along the north wall had a lot of efflorescence. The P.O.'s had painted the walls, and the efflorescence was pushing against the paint, making it easy to flake off in this section. Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of mortar loss, too. One of our top projects for the summer is to determine how to stop moisture from building in this wall, which receives little sun, as it is in between houses. Our inspector suggested regrading, which we'll have to discuss with the neighbors, probably.

All in all, it's been a mixed bag of discoveries the last week or so. But I think we're nearing the end (ha!) of the pile of stuff we have yet to remove from the basement.

Two More Flooring Contractors Visit the Box House

In our continuing quest for floor sanding options, we had two more contractors come in for an estimate in hopes of finding a midway point between the previous bids. Both of the companies that came in were top-rated on Angie's List, with what seemed like reasonable prices and lots of A+ reviews.

We liked the first guy quite a lot; he seemed to know his stuff and answered all our questions. He was here for about 15 minutes, and gave us a quote that seemed pretty decent. We liked that he could provide that on spot without having to go back to his office and crunch numbers.

The second guy provided more of a "presentation," explaining a bit about the sanding process and what we can expect as a result. He even had this nifty little laser tool for measuring rooms, rather than a standard tape measurer. (I have got to get one of those!) He brought a color chart, and based on the samples, I think we like the DriFast Special Walnut by Bona. It's an oil-modified quick drying stain. It's not too dark, not to light, and has a reddish cast to it.

This contractor also discouraged us from doing too much. The floors in the upstairs unit had been recently sanded by the Previous Owners, but we're not particularly happy with the results. He cautioned us that there is a limited number of times you can resand floors, so if we can live with it, that's what he would recommend, thus saving us some money. But he did also say he could probably buff those floors rather than fully sand them, and stain them a color we want rather than the yellowish color it is now. We'll most likely do that; as we will have to rip out the remaining carpet in the bedrooms and sand those rooms, I'd like all the floors to all match.

Most contractors have recommended doing only two coats of polyurethane, and this guy was no different. When we asked about a third coat, explaining that we have a dog and will soon have cats, too, he said he could do it, but it would not be the best use of our money. Then he told us that the stain coat is a sealant coat, and that the more top coats you have, the easier it will be to detect traffic patterns over time, as it will wear much differently. He said the coats are good for only 5 to 7 years anyway, and that we can always just buff the surface and reapply extra layers when we felt it was necessary. He was the only contractor to tell us that.

He did seem a bit concerned about the damaged floorboards in the downstairs dining room. He asked permission to lift one out to inspect the damage, thinking that it was termites. (Yikes!) It's only a few boards, and they look almost dry rotted. He was able to break a piece out pretty easily. He kept asking us if we had had the building inspected before purchasing it, which of course we had, and by someone who knows termites pretty well. I'm not sure what caused the damage, but I doubt it was insects. The building is solid brick, the foundation is concrete for 2/3 with brick above the ground, where the basement windows are. There's no exposed wood, and these floorboards are in the center of the house. Even so, after the contractor left we went into the basement to examine it from below. The great thing about the Box House is that much of its bones are visible or easily accessible. We pulled aside some of the ceiling panels in the basement and looked at the underside of the floor from below. Nothing.

So, now we're waiting for the last guy's quote to roll in, and will hopefully be able to make a decision by Monday.