It’s Raining, It’s Pouring, Are Your Windows Leaking?

It’s summertime in South Carolina, and we’ve been getting heavy rainstorms. If you are noticing water leaking into your home around your windows, you may have a serious construction defect that requires legal help.

A window leak could be a leak in the actual window itself, but more often what you see is water that is getting around the window. Water travels down the exterior wall and gets in where the window meets the wall. If that is the case, the water you are seeing around your window is a very small part of the water getting into your home. Most of the water is getting into and staying in the wall.

Water getting in around a window is usually because the builder did not properly integrate the wall waterproofing into the window installation. When that happens, water slowly enters the wall every time it rains, and you may not notice any water on the interior until this has been occurring for many years. Also, as the water slowly enters the wall over the years since the home or condo was built, the water will begin to rot any wood framing in the wall. Rot in the wall is more than just a nasty, moldy mess. The rot in the framing weakens the structure of the building. If allowed to go on for long enough, parts of the building’s structure will begin to fail.

Repairing leaks in your home and the rotten wood that results from them is often an extensive and costly repair. You should not have to pay for the repair when it was the result of the improper construction of the building, but builders usually refuse to get serious about these issues until lawyers get involved. If you have water leaking in around your windows, give us a call and we can evaluate whether the issue is something simple that can be fixed cheaply or is something that needs a lawyer to pursue the builder.