Resealing and flashing around windows and doors.
Failed sealant cut out and replaced around every window and door, with aluminium flashing renewed where water has found a way behind it.
What failed sealant does to a wall.
It is also one of the shortest-lived things on the outside of the building. Most of a wall is measured in decades. Sealant is measured in years, and when it goes, water stops running down the face of the house and starts running into it.
The damage is never where the failure is. Water that gets past a window joint tracks into the wall, saturates insulation, sits against brick through a freeze-thaw cycle, and eventually shows up as a stain on a ceiling or a mortar joint that has crumbled away. For [COMPANY NAME], renewing the sealant is a small job that prevents an expensive one.
- Failed sealant cut out, joints prepared and re-sealed
- Aluminium flashing replaced from the window edge to the rough opening
- Backer rod sized to the actual movement in the joint
- Leak investigation on openings already letting water in
- Whole house, one elevation, or a single problem opening
The same sealing work we do on towers.
Envelope sealing is a large part of what we do on high-rise buildings, where a failed joint turns into a very expensive problem very quickly. The materials and joint detailing [COMPANY NAME] uses at thirty storeys are the ones that go onto a house.
What an Ontario winter does to a joint.
Sealant does not wear out evenly across a house. It fails at the joints that move the most and take the most sun, and this climate is hard on both.
Water gets in, then turns to ice.
Once a joint opens even slightly, water sits in it. It freezes, expands, and widens the gap a little further. Every cycle makes the next one worse, which is why a hairline crack never stays hairline through a winter here.
The house is never completely still.
Frames expand in the sun and contract overnight, and the structure moves with them. Fresh sealant stretches through all of that. Sealant that has gone hard tears instead, and it almost always goes at the corners first.
One side of the house ages faster.
Ultraviolet breaks down the surface of the sealant over time, so the elevations taking the most sun lose their elasticity years before the shaded ones. It is why a house often needs one wall done well before the rest of it.
Sealant is the outer line of defence, not the only one. Where water has already got behind the flashing, new caulking on its own will not stop it, which is why the opening gets looked at before anything is quoted.
Resealing, answered.
Look for cracking, gaps at the corners, sealant that has gone hard or pulled away from one side of the joint, and staining on the wall below a window. A draft near a window on a windy day is usually the same problem further along.
It depends far more on exposure than on age. A sheltered north wall can go a long time. A south or west elevation taking full sun and driving rain will need attention considerably sooner, which is why houses are usually done a wall at a time.
If the sealant is the failure, yes. If water has already got behind the flashing, sealing over the top only hides the path it is taking. That is why [COMPANY NAME] assesses the opening first and renews the flashing where it needs it.
Yes, and it is the main reason to do it. Water that gets into a wall saturates the masonry and then freezes. That freeze-thaw cycle is what breaks mortar joints down and spalls the face off brick, and it starts at whatever joint let the water in.
Yes. [COMPANY NAME] can scope the work to a single opening, one elevation, or the whole house. Most people start with the wall that faces the weather, because that is where it will have gone first.
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