Rim joist / sill plate? What to do?

House Repair Talk

Help Support House Repair Talk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

walked

Active Member
Joined
Mar 20, 2014
Messages
36
Reaction score
6
We bought this house late last year, and I guess this got missed on the inspection.

For reference, I'm showing the circled part of the house, just to the right of the porch.

JqBFfWv.png




Here you can see, right up against the outside corner, there is a small piece of siding missing.


Even closer in, we can see what's going on:
Here is a closer view, showing that behind there there is a piece of wood, thats on it's side, vertical, that has obvious water damage / rot the second image is just to highlight the profile of this board:



It appears between the missing siding / lack of proper flashing is the culprit. What should my next step be? I'm borderline ready to just rip all the siding off and see what's under, but it's aluminum siding and I'm not sure if I'm ready to commit to that extent of a job yet.

(Secondary, but not for this subforum is how to patch that small missing segment of aluminum siding in the interim after dealing with this rot / before doing siding in full)
 
Not sure what that small board is. With a 100 year old house it is really hard to know what is going on and if it is a old issue or not. If the structural boards looks solid I wouldn't mess with it. Bend up a piece of aluminum coil stock so that it looks like aluminum siding to cover it.
 
Yeah, on the inside (exposed basement) everything looks and feels solid, fortunately.
 
If you have decided it is a non problem it is still a good idea to kill anything that might be living there. You can buy the green treatment they use for treating lumber by the quart, it paints like water.
 
how rotted is it? You can poke it with a screwdriver to see how soft it is. If it's not too bad, you could also treat it with a wood "petrifier", which will harden up the grain. Then cover it with flashing.
 
Back
Top