A bloke at Fairy Meadow put his hand through a door jamb.
Not dramatically. He was carrying a washing basket, knocked the jamb with his elbow the way you do a hundred times a year, and this time a section of it caved in like a cereal box. Behind it the timber was combed out into thin layers with dirt packed between them, and the paint on the face of it was completely intact. From the hallway that jamb had looked fine that morning and looked fine the day before.
He rang me first. Fair enough, it's a timber problem and I'm the timber bloke. But I was the wrong first phone call, and that's most of what this post is about.
The pest inspector comes before I do
Termite inspection and treatment is licensed work in NSW, and it isn't our licence.
Anyone doing commercial termite treatment needs a pest management technician licence issued through the Environment Protection Authority. Service NSW sets out what that licence covers, and the wording is direct about it: you need it if you're conducting commercial termite treatments. All Round Carpentry doesn't hold one and never has. We replace timber. We don't inspect for termites, we don't identify them, and we don't treat them.
So the order is pest inspector, then carpenter. Every time.
The reason isn't paperwork, it's that cutting into a live nest scatters them. Open up a wall with an active colony in it, pull the damaged studs out, put new timber in, and you've given them a fresh feed and a reason to relocate somewhere you haven't looked yet. I've been called back to houses where the repair was sound and the termites had simply moved two rooms over. The timber work was fine. The sequence was wrong.
If you find mud tubes running up a pier, a wall lining that sounds hollow, or a jamb that gives like that one at Fairy Meadow, leave the workings exactly as they are. No knocking them back to see what's inside, no fly spray, no screwdriver to test how deep it goes. Ring someone licensed and let them tell you whether it's live or long dead. Half the damage I end up repairing is old, from a colony that was dealt with years ago, and knowing which of the two you've got changes the whole job.
Where it turns up in an Illawarra house
The floor is the obvious place, and it's covered in the bouncy floor post along with the other two things that make a floor move. Underneath is where you find mud leads on the piers and joists that look perfect and sound hollow when you tap them.
Above the floor it's less obvious. Bottom plates are the classic, sitting on a slab or a bearer where there's moisture, and a wall can be well into trouble before anything shows on the plasterboard. Door jambs and window reveals, like that one. Skirting that has gone light and papery near a wet area. Roof timbers, which nobody looks at until something else takes them up there.
What ties all of those together is that termites eat from the inside out and leave the painted surface as a shell. That's why the damage is never the size of the hole you found. It's why I won't quote a termite repair off a photo, and why the first hour on site is opening things up rather than fixing anything.
The other thing worth knowing, because it comes up whenever someone is thinking about a rebuild: a steel frame isn't a free pass. The Your Home guide notes plainly that a steel frame does not remove the need for termite protection to the home. They'll go around steel to reach the skirting, the flooring, the door frames and the roof battens. Plenty of what's in a steel-framed house is still timber.
Cut back to sound timber, and not a millimetre less
The repair itself is honest work and there's no clever version of it.
We open up until we're into timber that's sound on all four faces, which is usually further than anyone wants it to be. Then the damaged section comes out and new timber goes in, spliced into what's left where the member can carry it, or replaced full length where it can't. Treated pine or hardwood, picked for where the member sits and what it carries. Bottom plates and anything near moisture get treated timber, no argument.
Structural work needs propping before anything is cut, and that's not optional on a wall that's carrying. If a bearer, a stud line or a lintel is involved, the load goes somewhere temporary before the damaged bit comes out. Skip that and you find out what the wall was holding up the hard way. Anything that turns into altering or removing a structural wall is a bigger job again, and it needs an engineer, which I've been through in the wall framing side of things.
Two things I won't do. I won't fill damaged structural timber and call it repaired, because a filler doesn't carry load no matter how solid it feels under a thumb. And I won't bolt new timber onto an eaten member to stiffen it up, which sounds sensible and just means you own one good stick and one hollow one bolted together.
Finish carpentry gets matched. Half the post-war places down here have jamb, architrave and skirting profiles you won't find on a shelf, so it gets run to suit or matched off the existing. Once it's painted you shouldn't be able to pick where the repair sits, and if you can, it isn't finished.
What actually decides the price
Not the timber. Structural pine is not what makes these jobs cost money, and if you've priced framing timber lately you already know that.
Three things move it. The first is how far it went, which is the one nobody can answer at quoting stage with any confidence, so expect a provisional line in any honest quote and be suspicious of a flat number given over the phone. The second is what the timber was doing. Replacing a length of skirting is a different afternoon to replacing a stud line under a roof load, even if the damage looks identical.
The third is access, and it's usually the biggest one. Damage in an open wall frame during a reno is cheap to fix because it's already open. The same damage inside a lined wall means the lining comes off, the repair happens, and the lining goes back with a plasterer behind me. Under a floor with six hundred millimetres of crawl space, every stick gets cut outside and passed in. Same repair, twice the labour.
Structural termite repairs are carpentry proper and worth having someone licensed do, since everything above is relying on the result. Anything over $5,000 all up needs a licensed builder and a written contract in NSW. Worth reading your home insurance policy before you assume any of it is covered, too. Check rather than assume, and check before the work starts rather than after.
Back to the jamb
Fairy Meadow turned out to be old damage. The inspector found no live workings, which meant we could open the wall the same week instead of waiting on a treatment.
It was never one jamb. The stud beside the door had gone for about 900mm up from the plate, the bottom plate under it was soft for a bit over a metre, and it had run into the skirting on both sides of the doorway. Two days, propped while we cut, new plate and stud in treated pine, jamb rebuilt and the architrave profile matched off the next doorway down the hall. Painted up you can't see it, which is the point.
He'd been walking past that jamb for years. The paint held right up until the washing basket.
If you've found something that gives when it shouldn't, get a licensed pest inspector through first and find out whether it's live. After that, Dave's on 0414 007 351, or send through what you found and whereabouts it is, and we'll work out how much needs opening up before anybody puts a number on it.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0414 007 351.
