Removing the bottom courses of siding to inspect and repair the sills and whatever else my be water and or termite damaged.
This area produced a bunch of live termites. The most common type of termite in this area are subterranean and need to return back into the soil every 24 hours for water or as in this case they are getting there water supply directly from the wet wood.
New wood in. This was a tough spot to lift. With the sills gone the house has to be raised by lifting the wall. 2 – 20 ton jacks with round steel posts. The other factor was the plastic water pipe below the ground level. Too much pressure on it and it will break. The load was distributed using 2 – 8′ 4×4’s.
Now that the damaged sills have been repaired it is time to start leveling up this house. The corner where the termite damage was repaired is the highest corner and became the baseline. This is the back of the house, approximately 42′ long. To lift this up without breaking any structural materials I had to use 8 jacks on the length. In the bottom right of the picture is the conrete block where the house was sitting originaly. The blocking in there is a 4×4 and 2 – 2×4’s flat ways. So that is 3.5 + 1.5 + 1.5 = 6.5. Yup, it was down in that corner 6 1/2″!
This was on the adjacent wall. This could have been prevented if I had an additional 6 jacks which would have brought the total up to 14. I don’t want to be in the house leveling business.
Here is a example of how much strength the Sheetrock has. When the outside wall went up so did the interior wall separating itself from the floor.
There was no shutoff for the water, so one was added below ground level thus allowing the whole system to be drained in the event that the temperature was going to be low enough to freeze the pipes solid and break them.