Really bad house design

I can't help with the question but did you screw up the picture urls or did Homeowners hub. They weren't links without rewirting on my part.

These are functional links, without the annoying /IMG

If the website insists on mutiliating link names, you'd be better off reading Usenet directly, instead of though this webpage, which does nothing more than copy what appears on usenet alt.home.repair

You can get a free news server from

I don't know what browser you're running, but the links all opened OK as provided here using Win Explorer 10.

That's what I was thinking too. The house needs a "skirt".

I'll guess there were no plans, no permit and no building inspector involved in the constsruction. To the OP: it sounds like you've owned the house for a while. Didn't the construction raise some flags when you bought it?

Tomsic

"1HandyWoman" wrote in message news:12a5c$51fd79a2$cf3aab60$ snipped-for-privacy@news.flashnewsgroups.com...

Ok what you need to do is this. The horizontal base timber will need to be replaced on a piecemeal basis. Also the rotted vertical timbers will need to be cut back.

So you need to construct dwarf wall (ie two or three bricks high )with the new base timber on top of it with a damp proof course between it and the new bricks. This will stop the same thing happening again.

ie you can cut out the rotten timber and replace it with the new brick wall.

It will have to be done bit by bit supprting the floors as the rotten wood is cut away. Should be possible to do an elevation at a time.

The job is not a big deal, any competent carpenter or DIY man could do it.

Yeah, that should be real practical. Go around the whole house, cut out six inches of sill plate, wall studs, drywall, etc. Replace it with brick. Then what? Install new drywall to the brick? What happens when you come to a door?

Good grief! Supporting the floors? It's a house built on a SLAB.

LOL - Not a big deal? Any DIY guy can do it? It's likely that someone following your advice did this to begin with.

The village idiot, once again.

Wow, that is a dumb design... I'm surprised it has lasted this long.

My in-laws house had a similar problem, where the basement extended out under the front and rear porches. As you would expect, water leaked in on the porches and rotted the sills, joists, and beams supporting the house. We solved it by doing away with the porches and extending the house out to the edge of the foundation.

You could probably do something similar by extending your house out to the edge of the slab.

If you don't want to add square footage, you might be able to cut the slab back an inch or two from the wall (as close as you can get with a concrete saw). Then you could add strapping to the outside of the walls so your siding could overlap the new edge of the slab. I would remove remaining part of the slab outside and regrade the yard away from the house. Or pour a new patio at a lower level, sloping away from the house.

The only other option I can think of would be to cut a trough around the perimeter of the house and install continuous drains. These are often installed in front of garage doors to keep water from running into a garage when the drive slopes toward the garage. It wouldn't stop splashback off the slab, and some water could still find it's way in under the sill, but it would reduce the volume.

Tricky problem. Good luck!

Anthony Watson

That last part is the key. Just extending the house out over the rest of the slab won't solve the problem, because the wood would still be right next to soil. And it would seem a lot simpler to just get rid of the slab and re-grade instead of extending the house out. The only unknown is if the terrain makes that difficult or impossible for some reason.

Agent 1.9, copyright 2002 ! But this is the first time it has had trouble with anything.

I suppose version 6 and 7 would have handled them. Sorry, 1H.