Here's a Hostile Creature

Craig DeWitt Headshot

I am at my parents' house in upstate New York this week, helping them keep their place intact. Seeing the ones you love grow older is difficult, but it is part of life. The house is freshly painted. The fields have been bushhogged (I found a hornet's nest in the process.). A couple barns still need painting, but I think we will take down a couple big dead trees first.

Following my opossum blog bit, Kim asked what other hostile creatures I have run into as an inspector. Many years ago when I first started working for Clemson University, I looked at a house that had mold growing out of the kitchen cabinets. Actually, that was the complaint, and when we looked, we found a white film of mold on about everything. It was behind dressers, under couches, even on chair legs. A little further investigation and we discovered that is was a water-conducting fungus, Poria incrassata (the same one that was in a recent news story HF did about orange blobs attacking a home). Most fungi need wet wood, but Poria can attack dry wood because it conducts water from the ground to the wood through a root-like structure. To stop it, you have to get rid of the source of water.

And Poria works fast. When you see the bright orange mushrooms, you are pretty well in trouble. In the house I looked at, the homeowner stepped through the hardwood floor several times carrying the TV set out of the house. From the surface, everything looked fine, but joists, subflooring and much of the oak flooring were gone. Damage was so severe that nothing below the ceiling could be saved.  We ultimately tied the Poria back to a low spot along the foundation that had also been recently mulched-another good reason to keep the yard graded properly.

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