Structural Exclusion in Commack

What is the actual perimeter of a Commack property?

Longer than the outside of the house, and that is the first correction most scopes here need.

On a detached suburban lot it is tempting to treat the exterior wall as the boundary. Walk it, close what you find, done. The trouble is that a Commack property routinely contains four or five separate enclosures, and animals treat them as one system.

The house itself, with its band joist line, its service penetrations, its roof edge and its openings.

The attached garage, which shares a framed wall with the house and has a large moving door in another. On most of this stock it is unheated and uninsulated, and it is where a great many problems begin.

The detached structures. Sheds on blocks or on a settled slab, a pool house, a workshop, a play structure with an enclosed base. None of them are heated, all of them are visited seasonally, and each is a place a population can hold through a summer.

The buried structures. Roughly 74 per cent of Suffolk County remains unsewered, with about 360,000 cesspools and septic systems countywide, so a large share of Commack lots has a tank or ring, risers, covers, a distribution box and a leaching field in the yard. These are not routes into the house. They are ground-level features whose condition determines where water sits and where cover exists, and a settled or cracked cover is a closure item for reasons that go well beyond pests.

The ground plane itself, which is where the harborage is: the deck void, the shed base, the log store, the compost, the boundary ivy, and the border that has been mulched a little higher every spring since the house was new.

A scope that addresses only the first of those closes one enclosure inside a system of five. That is why exclusion here is described as property work rather than building work, and it is why the survey walks the lot before it touches the house.

Why is the garage the hinge of most of these jobs?

Because it is the one part of the building that was designed to be open, and it shares a wall with the part that was not.

An attached garage on 1950s and 1960s construction is a concrete box with a slab floor, a large overhead door, usually a service door to the outside, and a framed wall between it and the living space. It is unheated. It stores things on the floor. And it has three failure points that turn up on this housing type with unusual consistency.

The overhead door at its bottom corners. A garage door seal is a wear item, and the slab and the apron in front of it have been through sixty winters of freeze-thaw. Where the apron has settled, or the slab has lifted at an edge, the seal no longer meets the concrete at the corners even when it looks tight across the middle. That gap is generous by rodent standards and it is available all year.

The service door threshold, which is usually the original, and which has usually dropped.

The wall between garage and house. This is the important one. It was framed as an exterior wall, then a structure was built against it at a different floor level with a different foundation depth. The top plate of that wall very often sits open into the floor structure above, because it was framed for load and then covered by a ceiling. Where the house has living space over the garage — extremely common on Commack split-levels — that route arrives directly under a bedroom floor.

Closing the garage properly is therefore not a minor line item. It is: a new bottom seal fitted to the door and, where the concrete has moved, the apron and slab edge addressed so the seal has something flat to meet; a proper threshold at the service door; the top plate of the shared wall closed with rigid material; and every penetration through that shared wall — electrical, plumbing, an old dryer vent, the entry for a wall-mounted opener — sealed with something that will still be there in fifteen years.

Do that, and a great many Commack complaints stop, because the route that produced them has been removed rather than baited.

What happens at the seam where an addition meets a 1960s frame?

Nothing good, and it is where six decades of improvement has quietly built the openings.

Almost every house here has been altered. Dormers, rear extensions, finished basements, replacement windows, added insulation, upgraded services, converted garages, decks, sunrooms and patios. Each of those meets the original frame at a junction, and the junction is where the work is.

Reading them in the order they typically happened:

Replacement windows. The old rough opening stays in the wall and the new frame is set inside it. The gap between the two is packed with whatever the installer used, which on a 1970s or 1980s replacement is frequently loose insulation and nothing else. Behind the trim, that gap can run the full perimeter of the opening and connect straight into the stud bay.

Added insulation. Blown-in or batt insulation improves the wall thermally and does nothing to close it. It also hides everything behind it, which matters when the band joist is later inspected.

A finished basement. Framing, insulation and wallboard against the foundation wall covers the band joist line — the single most important junction in the building — from both sides. On a house with a finished basement the accessible points are the mechanical room, any access panel, the underside of the stair, and the exterior. An honest scope says which elevations of the band joist were never seen.

A rear extension or dormer. New framing tied into old, a new roof plane meeting an existing one, a new soffit line meeting an original one, and a junction at the foundation between two pours of different ages. All four are seams.

A converted garage. The overhead door opening is filled in, usually with a stud wall and siding on the outside face, and the slab stays where it is. The joint between the old slab and the new wall, and the perimeter of the filled opening, are frequently the least-considered part of the whole building.

Central air conditioning. A refrigerant line set through the wall, a condensate line, and an outdoor unit on a pad. Three penetrations, and the condensate discharges against the foundation for the whole cooling season.

The way to work this is chronological rather than geographical. Establish what has been done to the house and when, then go and look at each junction that implies. On a stock this consistent, the list of likely alterations can be predicted before anyone has spoken to the owner, and the conversation gets much faster.

What is left of sixty-year-old aluminum soffit and fascia?

Less than it looks like from the ground, and the corners are where it has gone.

Post-war eave detailing gives very little depth. A shallow soffit, a continuous eave, a thin board or — on most Commack houses — an aluminum panel with a fascia cover over the rafter tails. It was cheap, it was fast, and it lasted a long time. It is now at or beyond the end of its service life on a large share of the hamlet.

The failure pattern is consistent enough to look for specifically.

Corners where a soffit run meets a gable end. The termination there was cut on site, is short, has the fewest fixings and takes the most movement. It is the single most common wildlife entry on this housing type, and it is invisible from inside the building.

Fixings that have backed out. Aluminum expands and contracts hard, and sixty years of that works nails and screws loose. A panel with two loose fixings bows, and a bowed panel leaves a gap along its edge.

The fascia cover. Fitted over the original timber fascia, it hides whatever the timber has done since. Where a gutter has been overflowing, the timber behind the cover can be soft while the aluminum in front of it looks perfect.

Ventilated soffit panels. Where perforated panels were used, the perforations are ventilation and must stay open. The right response is a rigid screened closure behind the panel line, not a filled panel.

The closure work at the roof edge has to be material that survives up there: rigid, mechanically fixed, and non-corroding. Sealant alone at height on aluminum is a temporary repair on a surface that moves. And because this is ladder work at the roof line, it is worth combining with the other roof-edge items in one visit — vent screening, stack flashing, ridge terminations — rather than returning three times.

The animals arriving through those openings are usually a wildlife management question rather than a rodent one; the eastern gray squirrel profile covers what a roof-edge entry looks like from the inside.

Which openings have to stay open?

Every one that moves air or discharges something, and getting this wrong is the most expensive mistake available in this work.

The instinct when a building has animals in it is to close everything. On a post-war house that instinct causes moisture damage, and moisture damage is more costly than the animals were.

Crawlspace and foundation vents. Where a Commack house has a crawlspace, its vents are doing a job. They get proper metal screening in a durable gauge, fitted so it can be inspected, not filled.

Gable and soffit ventilation. Attic ventilation is what keeps a roof structure dry and a roof covering at a sensible temperature. Blocking it produces condensation on the underside of the sheathing in winter, which produces exactly the damp timber that carpenter ants exploit.

Ridge vents. These get an appropriate closure at the ends and screening where the product allows, not sealant along the ridge.

Dryer, bathroom and range terminations. Each needs the correct terminal with a working flap, not mesh stretched over a duct. Mesh over a dryer termination lints up within a season and becomes a fire consideration as well as a ventilation one.

Combustion air openings. Where a plant room draws air through a dedicated opening, that opening is not available for closure. It is a life-safety item and it belongs to the heating trade.

Condensate and pump discharges. These stay clear, and they should be re-routed away from the foundation rather than blocked.

The general rule is straightforward and worth saying out loud: closure work makes a building tighter to animals and never tighter to air where air is doing a job. Where an opening has to keep working, it gets a purpose-made screen or terminal in material that will not corrode, fixed so a future inspection can confirm it is intact.

What material survives on a house of this age?

Whatever is rigid, mechanically fixed and matched to the surface it is fixed to — which rules out most of what gets used.

Post-war construction presents four surfaces and each of them wants something different.

Poured concrete takes hydraulic cement or an appropriate mortar at cracks and around sleeves. It is a forgiving material to close because the surface is sound and the openings are discrete.

Timber — sill plate, band joist, rafter tail, fascia — takes rigid closure fixed through into solid material, with sheet metal wherever a chewable edge is exposed. House mice work at an edge, so an edge that cannot be gripped is worth more than a sealant bead across a face.

Aluminum at the soffit and fascia takes a fixed rigid closure, not sealant. The panel moves seasonally, and a bead of anything flexible along a moving joint at roof height has a short life.

Siding — aluminum, vinyl or wood on this stock — is a cladding rather than a barrier, and closure work belongs behind it at the sheathing and the framing, not on its outer face. Sealing the visible face of siding to a wall does nothing except make the fault invisible.

The one material that needs an explicit position is expanding foam, and ours is that we do not use it. Not as the closure, not tucked behind a rigid one, not run over the top of a finished detail. Mice chew straight through cured foam, and its worse failure is presentational: a foamed hole looks closed, so the next person to walk the building does not check it. A scope that consists largely of foam is a scope that will read as complete and behave as though nothing was done. Keeping the product off the job removes the whole argument about how much of it is defensible.

The other position worth stating is on fixings. On a sixty-year-old building, screws hold and nails have already demonstrated that they do not. Anything at the roof edge, on aluminum, or on a surface that has been through six decades of expansion needs a mechanical fixing into sound material, and where the material behind is no longer sound the honest answer is that the substrate needs repair before closure is worth doing.

What does it cost to get this wrong at the town line?

Time, mostly — and it is entirely avoidable.

Commack is an unincorporated hamlet split between the Town of Huntington and the Town of Smithtown, roughly along Townline Road. It has no village board and no architectural review, so nothing about the appearance of a closure is regulated. What is regulated is construction.

The line between maintenance and construction runs through the middle of this work. Sealing, screening, closing, re-terminating, fitting a door seal, packing a penetration and cutting back planting are maintenance. Replacing decayed sill framing, cutting a new vent where none existed, rebuilding a porch or a stoop, altering grade with a retaining wall, and opening and reclosing a section of roof are construction, and construction is filed.

On a hamlet in one town that would be a single answer. Here it is two, with different submission requirements and different inspectors, and the answer depends on the address. It is a ten-minute check at the start of a job and a fortnight’s delay in the middle of one. For an operator with premises on both sides of the line — several of the commercial corridors run through both towns — the paperwork is not interchangeable either. The commercial program covers how that is handled on trade premises, and choosing a pest control contractor sets out what a proper scope document should contain before anybody signs anything.

In what order does the work run on a post-war lot?

Ground first, then the openings, then the roof — which is the reverse of the order complaints arrive in.

The ground plane. Cut back planting to expose the base of the building. Move the log store, the compost and anything stacked against a wall onto a hard base away from the house. Lift stored material off the ground inside the garage and the shed. Reduce the border height where it has closed the clearance at the siding. Extend downspout terminations so roof water leaves the building rather than pooling at a corner. Note the wastewater covers. None of this needs a contractor and all of it reduces what the lot can carry.

The band joist line and the penetrations. With the base of the building visible, this becomes a survey rather than a search. Every service that enters gets a proper closure around the sleeve. The gap between sill plate and concrete gets closed where it is open. Where the basement is unfinished, this is done from inside and it stays done.

The garage. Door seal, apron condition, service door threshold, shared-wall top plate, and every penetration through the shared wall.

The seams. Each addition, dormer, converted opening and replacement window, worked in the order the alterations happened.

The roof edge. Soffit-to-fascia corners, gable terminations, vent screening, stack flashings and terminals — one ladder visit, everything at once.

Then the canopy. Commack was farmland in 1955, so every street tree here was planted, and the planting is only now tall enough to bridge to a roof. Cornell notes many animals reach roofs by natural bridges from branches touching a building. Pruning back from the roof line is the cheapest item on this whole list and it removes the access rather than closing it.

Then re-check in the cold. A December morning on a closed building shows whether the closure was real.

What does a re-check a year later actually find here?

Usually one of four things, and none of them is a failure of the material.

The mulch went back. A border that was cut down to restore clearance is topped up in spring by whoever does the yard, and nobody connects that to the work done in October.

Something new was built against the house. A deck, a patio, a shed moved to a new spot, a raised bed, an air conditioning pad. Each of those crosses the closed perimeter and each was installed by someone with no knowledge of the scope.

A trade drilled a new hole. A generator, a car charger, a new cable run, an irrigation controller, a replacement condenser. Any of these puts a fresh penetration through the wall, and it is made good by whoever held the drill — which is where this whole problem started in 1964.

A fixing let go at the roof edge. Aluminum moves, and a closure fixed into sixty-year-old material occasionally needs a second fixing.

That list is the argument for a record. A scope on this housing type should read as located items, each with what was found, the material used and a photograph, and with anything unreachable named and explained. On a stock this uniform, a report showing no unreachable items usually means the finished basement was not accounted for.

It is also the argument for handing the list to the owner. The four things above are all discovered by the person who lives there long before a contractor would see them, and a household that knows the border height matters will keep the border down.

For the discipline itself, see structural exclusion. The reduction side is rodent control in Commack, and because most of this hamlet’s eleven thousand houses were built to the same details inside two decades, the clearance work that dries out one band joist tends to be the same work that keeps a deck ledger or a converted garage from turning into a carpenter ant site, so ant control and this page are usually priced off a single survey here. For the hamlet across every service, pest control in Commack, with the Long Island hub and the full coverage list. For a very different building problem, Roslyn is a historic village where the same work is governed by a board, and Glen Cove is a city where half the housing is shared.

If you want the property read as one system rather than four separate buildings, tell us what is on the lot.

Related

• Structural Exclusion — how we approach it
• All pest control in Commack
• Rodent Control in Commack
• Ant Control in Commack