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SANTA ROSA — Host, Sarah Rutan: Repairing dry rot can be costly. So, today we’re in Santa Rosa with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Greg Kuzmicki of Solidarity Painting to learn about how you can repair and prevent dry rot.
Expert Contributor, Greg Kuzmicki: Dry rot on a home is something you don’t really think about, but by the time you notice it, it can get very costly. When new home builders build homes, they don’t back prime the edges or the sides of the panels so you have a lot of water absorption, which causes dry rot down the road. You can see the example on here. This is a bay window and you can see how the water got absorbed into the siding and causes a lot of damage.
So, here is one more really good example of how the siding was not properly installed. It was never sealed, it was never primed so when you have raw wood over raw wood and the caulking breaks down, the water just absorbs and causes dry rot. So, before you put up new siding, you want to make sure your panels are primed on all the edges, the front and back. This will prevent this from happening – we pulled this away from a chimney, this was the bottom of the chimney, you can see how it’s all disintegrated.
So, once again, very important to locate all of the problem areas on your home. Number two, remove all the dry rot. Number three, prime all edges on new siding, backs, everything, really, really good. Then use a really good, high quality caulking material. Here’s an example of what you don’t want to use, even though it says 25 year, 35 year, 50 – it don’t make any difference, its all marketing. You do want to use something like this, its Side Winder and even though it’s made by the same brand, this is a very superior product and also this one here, it’s called Lifetime GE, it’s a urethane based, very high quality caulking material.
Host, Sarah Rutan: Thank you to our Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Greg Kuzmicki of Solidarity Painting. I’m Sarah Rutan.