My home was built in 1992 and has wood rot on the window sills, brick mold and front door feature. However, my neighbor’s home, built fifty years prior in 1942, has no wood rot. Why? There are a couple reasons.
One reason why my neighbor’s home doesn’t suffer from wood rot is because of the lead paint on his house. In spite of its drawbacks, lead paint is a good preservative. Another contributing factor to my wood rot is the type of wood used to build my house. Around 1962, the major lumber companies started growing genetically altered trees on their tree farms. These trees were genetically altered to grow longer, not faster. For example, depending on location, a tree would typically go dormant in the winter around October, ultimately creating winter wood until April. Winter wood is denser and has a closer cell structure. However, the genetically altered trees were designed to not move into the dormant stage until December, and come out of dormancy in early March. These changes created a structural change in the wood itself and lead to more summer wood with a looser and larger cell structure, which promotes wicking. The “newer” summer wood is straighter, cleaner, and looks better when painted or stained, but is not very well suited for exterior use.
Here at Fred, we use PVC on all exteriors whenever possible. Also, when we replace rotten wood, we only use PVC. Even though PVC is more expensive, it does not need to be painted nearly as often, will never rot, and will still be on your house 100 years from now. PVC also now comes in all the common trims used on the exterior of a home. Even though wood is a much cheaper material, new home builders have also converted to only using PVC. What we are now seeing is the slow, gradual move toward composite-type materials being used on the exteriors of homes everywhere, from decking, to window trim, to fiberglass exterior doors, to front features, to siding, to common boards, composite material is the wave of the future.
Call Fred for a free consultation. We will be happy to come out and show you what you can do to stop the rot.
