Preserving Rochelle Park, NJ Homes with Long-Lasting Foundation Repair and Basement Waterproofing

Identifying Wood Rot: The Hidden Enemy Threatening Your Home

In a damp Rochelle Park basement or a neglected, vented crawl space, excessive moisture can become a silent killer to your home’s support structures. When relative humidity and wood moisture content remains elevated, spores belonging to different species of wood rot will activate, wreaking havoc where they grow.

• Dry Rot: This type of wood rot can be dangerous as it can quickly spread to drier wood once it has begun growing, so long as there is enough moisture. Dry rot turns your solid support beams and floor joists into brittle and cracking structures that slowly crumble in block-like geometric patterns. This can make a home dangerous to live in as the supports become compromised.
• Wet Rot: This wood rot fungus grows on timber that’s continually subjected to water exposure. It typically remains isolated to the wet area but completely destroys the structural fiber of your wood, turning main supports soft, spongy, and weak.
• White Rot: White rot targets the lignin within wood cells, leaving behind a stringy, bleached appearance that leaves the timber incapable of safely supporting much load.

Blue Umbrella prevents wood rot with proper drainage solutions and tough 14-mil FlexiSeal vapor barriers to keep moisture out of your basement or crawl space. Furthermore, Blue Umbrella also uses wholehouse AprilAire dehumidifiers and crawl space dehumidifiers as extra lines of defense, depriving wood rot spores of the moisture it so needs to begin the growth cycle.