Exterior Wood Rot Repair in Wilmington, DE

A window sill is shaped to shed rain, but once the paint cracks at a joint, water soaks into the end grain and stays there long after the surface dries. The same thing happens at the foot of corner boards, along the bottom edge of window casings, and wherever trim meets a porch floor or a roof. We cut out the rotted length and fit new stock, matched to the old trim as closely as available stock allows, so the new piece sheds water the way the first one was meant to.

Rot in the frame around an entry door, from the sill up the jamb legs, is covered on our door jamb page.

A porch column supports part of the porch roof, so rot at its base is as much a structural problem as a cosmetic one. Hollow wood columns tend to fail from the bottom up, where the base sits in rain and snowmelt on the porch floor. How much of the shaft has gone soft is what tells Jimmy whether the base can be rebuilt or the column has to be replaced. If a column has to be removed, the roof above it is supported where needed while it is removed.

• Warning signs: a crumbling or spongy base, a gap opening under the top of the column or paint that keeps blistering in the same low spot.

Siding gives out in patches: under a window that has been leaking, beside a chimney or along the lowest course where splashback off the ground keeps the boards wet. We remove the damaged boards, inspect what is behind them, and fit new boards into the run.

Shutters hang on those same walls; hanging new ones and re-hanging loose or worn pairs is its own job.

Soffit and fascia, the boards under and along the eaves, rot for the same reasons as the rest of the trim. That roof-edge work, including trim returns at the corners, has a page of its own.

Jimmy presses the tip of a Phillips screwdriver into the wood, starting at the worst spot and working outward until the tip stops sinking and meets firm fiber. That line between soft and sound shows how far the rot really runs, and it is how he works out, at the estimate, which pieces are repaired and which are replaced.

He also looks for the water, because rot means a leak somewhere above or behind it: an open miter, a failed caulk line, a sill that has settled and now pitches toward the house. Repairing rot at the source means dealing with that entry point as well as the wood, or the new board gets wet the same way the old one did.

On a Wilmington row home, the front porch sits in a line with the porches next door, and where the columns match from house to house, a new one has to match the row as well. A turned column is shaped on a lathe, and where it meets the porch floor, its end grain faces straight down. End grain soaks up water the way a bundle of straws does, and a porch floor that holds a puddle after rain keeps that end wet for days. A turned profile that matches the neighbors' is hard to buy off the shelf, which is why the probe matters here. Finding exactly where the sound wood starts lets the original column stay up and keep the row's look wherever it can.