Porcini is among the newest harbor restaurants to open in Crescent City, a six-hour drive from San Francisco. Its owners have been waiting for so long to serve Del Norte food fare with a dash of Italian or French. However, the last two years prior to the opening have been somewhat rough not just for the owners.
“Termites had eaten up the front of the building and the harbor district had to replace the deck, which wasn’t properly installed.”
She further reports that “the termite damage was so extensive that the building’s south wall had to be torn down.”
However, if you visit the place now, you’ll barely notice the horrors left by the building’s previous tiny but deadly tenants.
Termite treatment experts say two years is a long time to let a termite invasion go uncontrolled. It only takes a colony six months to deal significant damage on a wood structure. They don’t even need to develop the ability to eat materials other than wood, as the best way to pull a roof down is to weaken its wooden trusses
While termites eat slowly (contrary to their depiction in cartoons as fast eaters), they find strength in numbers. An entire colony of 60,000 termites eats wood at a rate of 0.2 ounces a day; in just six months, they would have consumed more than a foot of wood. A foot of wood lost from a critical support structure is more than enough to trigger an engineering nightmare.
Hard to Close the Deal
One of Porcini’s owners said neither they nor the district expected the extent of the damage to the structure when they signed the lease in 2012, and two years’ worth of transformation had to be undertaken.
As with any kind of defect, termite damage affects the resale value of any property. In fact, the district officials were lucky that the sale of the property pushed through despite the extent of the termite damage. In most other cases, property buyers wouldn’t be so keen on dealing with any restructuring. Additionally, sellers are obliged to disclose the extent of any property damage to buyers, further diminishing the likelihood of a sale.
A property that has a history of termite infestation will therefore greatly benefit from the services of termite repair professionals, like those at Times Up Termite. These experts can do everything termite related, from inspections and extermination, to property repair. They almost always win the battle against termites, saving properties and their resale values from a total wipe-out.
(Source: New Harbor restaurant: Is the long wait really over? Del Norte Triplicate, April 8, 2014)