Water Damage

Even in this photo, you can see some of the water damage. You can also see the lack of protection that this door & sidelight assembly has.

Every time it rains, this assembly gets wet. Not too surprisingly, I developed my own axiom many years ago.

It goes like this; “If you have a wood door or window assembly that gets wet every time it rains, you will have problems no matter what.”

Yes, you can go out and caulk all the joints and touch-up the paint every year, and that might stem the major problems from getting very far…

…but for most folks, having to do that every year is itself “a problem.” Thus the axiom stands!

People sometimes ask me why the wood windows and doors in the house they grew up in never seemed to have any problems like this.

After Shot #1.

To which I point out that:

1. Much of the farm-house architecture of centuries past had wrap-around porches with substantial eves and overhangs.
2. The quality of the wood was no doubt substantially better. Tight-grained old-growth perhaps. Not so much nowadays.
3. And most everything was coated with LEAD until 1978 in the good old US of A. Toxic, yes…but it really worked in protecting of the exterior woodwork.

After Shot #3.

…quantity of prosperous Americans and wealthy foreigners who came here to live like Americans. And just about any new design that an architect could come up with in the frenzied competition to stand out from the crowd in the sunbelt areas worked pretty well there. Have you ever heard the phrase “Miami Vice Architecture?” These fads are not simply imagined.
But many of the new designs seemed to out-pace proper flashing techniques or proper “enforcement” of said techniques.

After Shot #4.

Remember the EIFS stucco problems & related lawsuits in these parts? Well it’s the same situation with non-stucco construction as well, only without the lawsuits. Perhaps because the repairs aren’t quite as expensive. Yet the ramifications from some of the ill-advised sunbelt architecture and building practices being used in the Willamette Valley where mother nature’s wetter inclinations test the work of every architect and general contractor, keeps our company busier than you might imagine.