Termite damage to subfloor

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bealew

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Hi, a few years ago my grandmother noticed termites in her home, the exterminator got rid of them and it wasn't until about a year later I noticed the floor was rotten in her bedroom closet. The damage runs a little ways out into the bedroom also, I have been underneath to see how bad it was, and the area is only about 2 feet up from the ground. Now there is a big hole in the closet floor that I have covered the best I could, but the joists are just dust now and I have no idea what to do to support it, putting down new chip board down inside the house is no big deal. But I don't know what to do to support it underneath. I'm so afraid that, that entire corner of the room is going to cave in. Anybody who has any ideas, it will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Wesley
 
bealew, welcome to the site, You are probably looking at a fairly big job. You will want to crawl around under there with a screwdriver or something and poke at the joist and determin just how much is left and how long they are and how many have this problem and then you want to look at the wood these joists are sitting on. If you are worried gramma going thru the floor you could build a temp wall between the ground and the joists to hold up the floor while you devalope a plan for perminent repairs.
 
I went under and found that it's really bad it's all gone, but the good news is, it's just in that one corner everything else seems solid, I really don't know how it's holding up, there is a very heavy antique phonograph setting right in the corner, but it hasn't fell through.
 
When you say corner, can we figure you have three or four bad floor joists. What you want to be looking at is to remove all damaged or rotted wood, a treatment of one of the copper compounds to kill anything that might be living there and then sister full length new joists along side the old ones.
 
Yeah I think that there is probably like four or so, it's a rectangle shaped house and this is in the back left corner, I could probably put sister joists on, that's a good idea, thanks. Then I could take up the old plywood that's bad and put down new, and maybe a few posts in the ground to brace it underneath. Do you think that will work?
 
The sistered joists want to be the same as the old ones full length. It might be just as easy to remove the floor over those joists and just change them out completely without working in a tight space.
 
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