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Beautiful People:

I am working on my garden apartment. Right now, the area underneath the front windowsills is exposed, on the inside, to the brick (as is much of the rest of the house).

On a nasty wet day like today, the rest of the brick is nice and dry, but the area underneath both the windowsills is as damp as can be.

We pulled out lots and lots of rotten wood from this area: rotten floors, molding, wainscotting, etc. So I don’t think this is a new problem.

There were real gaps that let light in, so we filled those cracks with steel wool and expanding foam and figured we solved the problem. But it is still as wet as can be down there under the sills!

How do I best troubleshoot this? Do I look at the grade of the cement in front of the windows? The windows themselves (it’s not the window casing that’s leaking, it’s the wood frame underneath the casing)?

I certainly don’t want to replace all that wood only to let it all rot again.