When it Rains....

it pours rots wood...
News flash... it rains in Florida... a lot. Earth shattering news right? Well, one side of our house gets slammed with rain. We have five windows on that side of the house and all of them have a good chunk of the paint stripped off them and on two of them it was clear from the inside that things were rotting.. never a good thing. The worst part of spongy wood is you are never sure how bad it is until you open things up at which point you can't go back. In our first house, that turned into replacing the whole exterior back wall of our house so we are well aware of how these things can spiral.
So what do you do? You cross your fingers and toes and open things up. The longer you wait the worse things gets so all you can do is hope for the best.

This first problem window was in Will's room and we got pretty lucky. We popped off the quarter round (which was rotten through) and while the wood directly under the window was pretty much rotten through, the sills were solid.

Nate scrapped out all the rotten wood. It extended through about 80% of the wood under the window so there was clearly a water leak that had been an issue for quite some time. We needed to find out where the water was coming in so I shoved some paper towels in the gap under the window and Nate grabbed the hose.

Not too long after he started spraying, the paper towel in the left corner got nice and wet.

Once we narrowed it down, we used our watering can to pour water on specific points. It turns out that the caulk had cracked in the corner on the outside and that little crack was enough to cause all that damage.

To fix things, we scrapped out the busted caulk on the outside and replaced it with silicone caulk so it wouldn't crack again. (you can also see in the bottom pic how chipped the paint is and how we get nasty algae growing on our siding)

On the inside, Nate shimmed up the window and then spray foamed the gap where the rotten wood had been. The foam expands to fill the space so it seals from the inside out and provides a little extra support to the window.

New trim and some caulk and we were looking good.

Now the other window (in our back entrance) was a bit worse. All the wood under the window to the wall frame had to come out.

The wall even had quite a bit of rotten wood in the center but nothing so bad that we needed to replace the wall.

Nate replaced the sills and once again shimmed up the window.

Once again, we sealed everything on the outside with caulk and spray foamed on the inside. On this window the inside trim was in good shape so we just put it back.

Then I went through and sealed everything with caulk. It still needs some paint but the whole back entrance needs to get repainted so I'm waiting until I'm ready for the rest of the room.

A bunch of work and visually we haven't changed anything... BUT... we now know these windows are solid which is awesome.
Do you have any house maintenance projects you're working on?