I read Ruth Ferreira's (Letters. March 6) solution to mouldy houses. Keep the windows open. As when she was a child the house she lived in she claimed would be a mouldy house in today's view.
I had the privilege of helping my grandfather, a builder, in school holidays in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Wellington, the capital of damp houses in that era.
One day we were replacing the rotten boards of a house in Island Bay and after we had ripped the weatherboards off, he said to me "Do you see how all the horizontal frames are narrower than the vertical frames and how the bottom is not filled in?"
He went on to say "that before the war, houses were built to let any water that got in find an easy way out without soaking into the inside walls." He also said, "that when radiata pine became the standard after the war, timber mills stopped making a narrower horizontal 2 x 4 and what happens with those houses is water gets in and can't find an easy way out, so it soaks into the inside pinex or gib-board walls and grows mould".
Since the mid-40s, our houses have been built to keep water out rather than let water find its own way out.
