Because what's DIY remodeling without the termite poo?

Feb 17, 2004

I’ve been steadily working on the house. I’m not touching the kitchen cabinetry, because that requires major effort: things have to be stripped down to the bare wood (which was never sealed, BTW…how bloody lazy can some peoples’ children get?!??). The bathroom’s been repainted with semigloss, and the kitchen’s been given its first coat of white paint, so the back half of the place is now visually liveable. My landlord now gets to do termite treatments. Lucky them. Lucky me, for getting to live with it.

I found the evidence when painting the window trim. I lightly sanded the current coat of paint so that my chosen color would actually adhere, and not just pull away in strips (like much of the current paint has done. Piss poor prepwork on -=someone’s=- part. That’s all I’m saying.) So far, so good…until the wood dissolved under the sanding stroke, and a whole bunch of itty bitty brownish granules spilled out. Ah, joy.

Then again, what’s a little remodelling without the termite poo?

The entire right side of the window, and a good portion of the bottom, had been eaten away by termites. I made (yet another) trip to O*SH and got a tube of wood putty / repair stuff to fill up the gaping holes. (Not strictly the best practice, I know, but…NME.) It did not squeeze nicely out of the tube. I had to Schwartzenegger that sucker, and still I couldn’t evenly get the pink goop from tube to miniature-chasm-in-woodwork. I finally ended up slitting the tube open and scooping it out with the putty knife. I finally got those large gaps all filled in and evened out, then sealed them and painted over the whole thing. It looked decent, so I went to do the living-room window trim. I wasn’t finding active infestations, so I hadn’t notified the landlord. I was, however, going through quite a few tubes of this wood putty. Two more were needed for the living room windows. Still, all seemed to go well until I saw little bugs pushing little brown pellets out of a new hole in the top bar of the bedroom window woodwork.

...yes. And for this I’m paying more than $700 a month.

Keywords: | pests | home | building codes |
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