Is My Wood Rotting Even If It Isn’t Soft?

Everyone has dealt with a bit of mold in their life at least once. Usually, mold is considered to be extremely soft to the touch and that’s what homeowners look for when determining if their crawl space wood is rotting. However, this is the tricky thing about looking for signs of wood rot: not all fungi make the wood in your crawl space soft. There are some forms of wood rot that go by unnoticed by homeowners for long periods of time because they don’t show the “obvious” signs of mold growth, one of them being the spongy texture so commonly attributed to mold. Brown rot is another fungus that can cause your wood to rot, so learning to see the signs of it is beneficial.

Brown rot was traditionally called dry rot because it does not soften wood and instead just makes it crack. It was believed that brown rot did not need any kind of moisture in order to grow, but this has been proven false. Brown rot can grow in seemingly dry places because it’s capable of pulling moisture from afar, more so than many other types of wood rot. Its ability to grow through concrete, plaster, drywall, and mortar is one of the reasons it’s so incredibly difficult to treat. Even if the crawl space itself is relatively dry, if it manages to get through the walls, it becomes a very challenging growth to stop.

Before it grows, brown rot leaves a layer of red dust on the surface of the wood. These are the spores, which wait on the wood for the perfect moisture conditions before the actual fungus itself grows. The spores can survive for weeks and just because you dust it all off doesn’t mean the brown rot is gone. Brown rot is often confused for termite damage by homeowners because it leaves a very similar pattern of small, square cracks. If your floor is sagging, you know your crawl space is humid, and the wooden joists are significantly cracked, they are most likely rotting.