The Uh-Oh We Discovered in June

 This summer, we had several big projects planned.  And then we found one we hadn't planned.  Uh-oh.

One day I noticed that the siding on the walkout wall of the basement didn't look right.  It looked, well, warped, but I knew that there hadn't been any exposure to high heat that would have warped the vinyl.  I mentioned it to DH, and he went down to take a look.

He agreed that it did, indeed look weird.  And so he took a piece off to investigate.  Turned out there was absolutely nothing wrong with the siding.  The problem was with the wall behind it! Big uh-oh!

See that dark staining on the OSB?  That's not supposed to be there.  Even worse, do you see the area where the OSB is missing?  The insulation underneath isn't supposed to be visible.  Uh-oh.

DH ended up taking off all the siding and the housewrap from this wall. This 30' long wall with two doors in it. There was a lot of damage. FUC... Uh-oh.

It appears that water had been seeping under the siding at about where the deck on the first floor attaches to the back of the house.  For years.  It had gotten not just under the siding, but under the house wrap and slowly rotted out the OSB.  A rather large colony of ants had moved in and were loving that environment of soft wood.  And, once we took off the rotten OSB, we could see that our icynene insulation--touted as rodent and insect proof (or repellent or something) back when we built the house in 2002-2003 -- had indeed been eaten into by rodents or insects or something.  Uh-oh.

Those other projects we'd had on the docket, well, they were going to have to wait.  And some of the funds we'd earmarked for them were going to have to go to fixing this.

We contacted our home-owners insurance, on the off chance that repairs would be covered.  Nope.  Not caused by a catastrophic event, such as a storm, so therefore we were on our own to deal with it.  Uh-oh.

DH had a few local builders come out to take a look at the extent of the damage and give him quotes on repairs.  Thankfully they all agreed that the stud wall and first-floor floor trusses (holding up the house, basically) were structurally unharmed.  So all that really needed to be done was get rid of the dang ants, remove all the OSB, put on new OSB, put on some sticky waterproofing membrane above and below the ledger board attaching the deck to the house, put on new housewrap, and reinstall the siding DH had carefully removed.

Well heck, we could do that ourselves.  We had, afterall, designed and built the house and done the vast majority of the labor ourselves back then.  So, over the course of several evenings and a weekend or two (with a week's pre-scheduled and not delayable vacation in between), we did the demo.  And the rebuild.

It really wasn't difficult, just a little acrobatic and contorting in places.

You can't imagine how much satisfaction we felt when this picture was taken.  Good as new!