Water Damage

East Vancouver, across from the Portland airport, within sight of the mighty Columbia.

The arch-top wooden 2nd story doors seen in the previous photo with the Juliet Balcony have no protection from the elements.

And most all of us in this area know how the weather gets near the river not so very far the mouth of the gorge. The bottom-rail is toast on both doors. You can see better the telltale wavy-wood sticking that signifies the existence of water-damage (rot) if you click on the photo and enlarge it.

No, those are not true-divided lites. The muntins are simulated. Semi permanently adhered to the glass on both the interior and exterior sides. In the industry, we call this SDL. Simulated-Divided-Lites. So in reality, each door has only one insulated glass unit, even though the above photo showing the fogged-up glass makes it look like they are individual insulated units.

Back at our shop, the new bottom-rails are fabricated and installed. After weighing a number of options which we gave to our client, including the option of providing new doors, our client chose to have us replace the failed-glass, and the rotten bottom-rails, but to eliminate the SDL.

So the muntin grids were removed with the failed glass and the new tempered glass was manufactured while the glue had time to cure on the two repaired doors.

We replaced all the wood sticking that holds the glass to the doors.

After the new sticking was primed, it is carefully covered with masking tape, as is the glass and the door sash. The extensive masking serves two purposes.

It keeps the silicone sealant off the surfaces that will be painted, since silicone does not take paint, and it makes for a very professional caulking job. A proper caulking job includes applying just enough to achieve a certain degree of caulking oozing-out to ensure that all the seams and voids are filled between the sticking, the door sash and the glass surfaces beneath the sticking.

We use a special silicone caulking product that avoids the adverse reaction that can occur with the off-gassing of some caulking and the consequential degradation of the sealant (butyl) that seals the insulated glass unit. The point of course being that if the wrong sealant is used, it could cause further glass failure.