The owners of most homes with timber windows will have to deal with wood rot at some time.
The point is to spot it early and handle it permanently. PERMANENTLY is the key word.
Now many of the wood fillers on the market today, including the epoxy “two pack systems” are not good enough for even small areas of rot, because they shrink, let in water and allow the rot to continue.
A client may not know the extent of the wood rot when seeking an external painting quotation, and a decorator may not be trained to recognise it.
Then what might happen is; the decorator gives a fixed price and later discovers rot during the preparation stage.
Because of the fixed price agreement he may at this point be inclined to handle it quickly without further reference to the client. The rot would then continue, effect a larger area and the house will require repainting prematurely.
So let the painter know that if the unforeseen is uncovered you want to know.
You should hold your contractor to a fixed price for a particular specification, but if the specification changes so can the price and this is in the clients’ interest.
Better still, if you find someone who has the experience to see incipient rot at the time of quotation, realise you are onto a precious commodity and engage them.
Rot can be spotted by areas of shrinking, sometimes unbroken paint, where the affected wood has shrunk behind the paint surface. Or push a knife or spike into any suspect surface and see if it goes through like butter.
Rot can manifest as premature flaking paint, leaving the client thinking the previous decorator’s preparation wasn’t up to the mark. He would of course be right.
Most rot to an external area will be wet rot. But if the rot is DRY ROT, the affected timber must be removed completely, sometimes by experts, rather than repaired.
Therefore a decorator should know how to recognise the difference and report accurately to the client.
There are now, on the market in the UK, products that have made use of modern chemistry and decorators if they are up to speed should be aware of these.
But products are only as good as how they are applied and some of these require specific training to achieve exact application.
To this end I invite you to look deeper into my website, particularly at the REPAIR CARE products.
Good luck
Joe