When you purchase a new home in Charlotte, you might not be thinking about maintenance right away. It’s tempting to fill your time with exciting home improvement projects, but if the wooden structures of your home develop a problem with dry rot, you’ll have a very different kind of project on your hands!
Treating dry rot in wood is difficult, time consuming, and potentially dangerous for homeowners. Problems may develop over time without your knowledge, snowballing into an expensive headache by the time you uncover the damage.
What you might not know is that you can take simple steps to prevent dryrot before it becomes a problem.
What Is Dry Rot and Why is It a Problem?
Dry rot is a misleading name for the fungus that grows on wood as a result of moisture exposure. It produces a damp, musty odor that you may recognize as the smell of rotting wood. When dry rot permeates the building envelope, that odor may be the least of your problems.
You should never touch suspected dry rot without personal protective equipment (PPE), but with the proper gloves on, touching it can tell you more about what type of dry rot is inside your home.
Yellow Dry Rot: Targets hardwood. When touched, the wood will feel spongy.
White Dry Rot: Feels “powdery” to the touch and crumbles away under pressure.
Musty odors from dry rot are the result of an off gassing process that can expel potentially dangerous pollutants into your home. Off gassing refers to the release of chemicals, primarily Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).
The VOCs that dry rot produces include spores that can cause allergic reactions in sensitive individuals but all home occupants are at risk. Dry rot spores can be an irritant for your respiratory system, or cause skin rashes and reactions.
If you begin to experience any symptoms of dry rot exposure, you should immediately contact your doctor before beginning the process of locating and removing the issue!
Where In My Home Should I Check for Dry Rot?
If you’re noticing a musty smell like old mushrooms or wet cardboard inside of the home, you might be closer to the source of the issue than you realize.
Trust your nose and begin your search as soon as possible. While dry rot can spread throughout a wooden structure, some areas are hotspots and often serve as the source of problems.
Common places that dry rot may develop include:
- Joints between vertical and horizontal services
- Wooden structures underneath roof drainage
- Where the deck attaches to the home
- Wooden window sills
Discoloration or cracks in the wood could be an indication of the presence of dry rot. In your crawl space, leaking pipes or areas where humid air can enter are excellent spots for the fungus that causes dry rot to thrive.
How To Prevent Crawl Space Dry Rot
To prevent dry rot damage, you need to reduce or wholly eliminate the excess moisture in your home. The crawl space is an often-forgotten area of the home that can be a hotbed of dry rot activity if leaking pipes or unsealed entrances are allowed to persist.
Crawl space encapsulation from Greenserve can help to mitigate moisture issues in your home, preventing dry rot from beginning in the first place. We create a vapor barrier between humid outside air and your crawl space, shielding your home from nasty odors and poor indoor air quality.
It’s not just older homes that need to look out for dry rot though. If you live in a new build, you could still benefit from the superior crawl space ventilation provided by the ATMOX system. Greenserve is the Charlotte area’s premier ATMOX system crawl space contractor. Good crawl space ventilation can help ensure your home is less likely to develop issues with stagnant humid air, reducing the overall moisture issues in the home.
Greenserve Is Your Team of Dry Rot Removal Superheros
If your home has developed a dry rot problem that’s beyond the point of prevention, don’t try DIY! Treating dry rot without proper personal protective equipment (PPE) can be dangerous, and potentially cause further off-gassing issues in the home. Without the right professional knowledge or any of the tools on hand, you may do more harm than good.
Greenserve offers dry rot repair services to help you solve any lingering issues in your home. Our professional team will perform a free consultation, reviewing the extent of the dry rot problems in your home and recommending professional services and solutions based on your personal situation.
