Woodpeckers are not the problem, they are the symptom
Woodpeckers attacking the same board every spring are almost always after carpenter bee larvae. Fix the bees or the birds keep coming back.
Free quotes. No obligation. We connect Woodstock homeowners with a vetted local soffit and fascia repair crew. We are not a contractor and we do not perform the work ourselves.
Every spring in the wooded parts of Cherokee County somebody stands in their yard watching a bird methodically destroy their roofline and wonders what it wants. The answer is almost never the wood. It is what is living inside the wood.
Start in April with the bees. Carpenter bees look like large bumblebees and behave quite differently: the males hover aggressively around the eaves and cannot sting, and the females quietly drill. The entry hole is unmistakable once you have seen one, perfectly round and about the diameter of your little finger, as though somebody went at the board with a spade bit. Under it there is often a small pile of coarse sawdust on the deck or the windowsill, and a yellowish stain running down from the hole.
What happens next is invisible. The bee turns ninety degrees and tunnels along the grain, six inches to a foot or more, and provisions a row of chambers with pollen and an egg in each. Those tunnels get reused and extended year after year by the next generation, so an old nesting site in a fascia board can be honeycombed inside while the outside shows three neat holes.
Then the woodpeckers arrive. A woodpecker can hear larvae moving inside a board. It does not drill a neat hole, it tears the face off the wood along the line of the tunnel, which is why the damage so often looks like a ragged trench rather than a set of punctures. This is why the two questions people ask, "why is a bird attacking my house" and "should I worry about these bees", have the same answer.
Pileated woodpeckers do the worst of it here. They are the crow-sized ones with the red crest, they are common in the older wooded neighborhoods on the Towne Lake side of town and out towards Ball Ground, and a single bird can open up a foot of fascia in an afternoon.
What actually stops the cycle. Paint. It is not an exciting answer but it is the correct one. Carpenter bees select bare, weathered or stained softwood, and they will nearly always pass over a surface with a sound coat of exterior paint on it. Fascia and soffit trim that has been allowed to go grey and chalky is what invites them, and on most houses the elevation that gets hit is the one that gets the most sun and therefore lost its paint first.
Filling the holes is worth doing and worth doing with the right material. Use an exterior-grade epoxy wood filler, not caulk. Caulk stays flexible, shrinks over a season, and a bee reopens it without much effort. Fill, sand, prime and paint. If you can only do part of that, painting matters more than filling.
Timing is the part people get wrong. Do the work in late summer, after the new generation has emerged, or in very early spring before nest building starts. Sealing a hole in May traps live larvae, which then chew their own way out through your repair and leave you with fresh holes and a fresh set of birds. If you must do it in season, treat the tunnels first and leave them open for a few days before filling.
When it is worth changing the material instead. If the same elevation has been hit three years running, you are maintaining a food source rather than fixing a house. Carpenter bees cannot tunnel into fiber cement, PVC trim or aluminium-wrapped board. Replacing that one run in something they cannot use ends it permanently, and by the third repair it is usually the cheaper path as well.
One thing not to do: woodpeckers are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, so every legal remedy is exclusion, deterrence or removing what they came for. In practice, removing what they came for is also the only thing that works, since a bird deterred from one board simply moves eight feet along the same fascia.
The honest summary is that this is a three-part job and most people only do one part. Treat the bees, repair the wood properly, and paint it. Skip any one of those and you will be standing in the yard again next April.
More like this
- How to check your fascia without getting on a ladder A five-minute check from the ground that tells you whether your fascia is sound, using nothing but your eyes and a screwdriver. No ladder required.
- Sagging gutters are almost never a gutter problem Sagging or detaching gutters are usually a fascia problem, not a gutter problem. Rehanging them on rotten board is money spent twice.
- What to put back when the trim has failed What to put back when your trim has failed: how the four common materials behave in Georgia humidity, what each costs, and where each is the right answer.
- What is worth doing yourself and what is not An honest list of the roofline jobs worth doing yourself, the ones worth paying for, and the ones that are not repairs at all.
- Almost every attic intruder comes in at the roofline Squirrels, bats and wasps almost always enter at the soffit and fascia joint. What to look for, and why sealing it in the wrong order is expensive.
- When the trim is the symptom and the roof is the cause Sometimes the trim is the symptom and the roof is the cause. How to tell the difference before you pay to replace boards that will rot again.
Services
Common questions
What does soffit and fascia repair cost in Woodstock?
Most repairs land between 8 and 22 dollars per linear foot installed, with the material and the height of the elevation deciding where in that range you fall. Small jobs are governed by the minimum charge rather than the footage: nearly every crew has a floor of roughly 250 to 400 dollars for a callout, because the setup and the ladder are most of the work on a short run.
Why is there a minimum fee for a small repair?
Because the drive, the ladder or staging, the gutter coming down and going back up, and the paint are the same whether the run is four feet or fourteen. A crew that charged strictly by the foot would lose money on every small job and would simply stop taking them. If you have more than one small repair, having them done in the same visit is much cheaper than two callouts.
How do I measure my roofline to get a rough price?
Measure along the ground below each run of gutter and add the runs together, which is close enough for an estimate. A typical single-storey Woodstock house has roughly 120 to 150 linear feet of fascia, and a two-storey with dormers runs 180 to 250. You only need to measure the sections that have actually failed, not the whole house.
Why does fascia rot so quickly in this part of Cherokee County?
Because the subdivisions were cut out of standing loblolly pine and the builders left as many trees as the plans allowed. Pine needles mat in the gutters rather than washing through, the standing water rises above the back lip, and it runs down the back of the fascia board, which is the one face that was never primed. Heavy tree cover also keeps the roofline from drying between storms.
My house was built in the nineties. What is my trim made of?
Almost certainly hardboard, which was the standard exterior trim across the southeast from around 1985 to 2000 and covers most of the Towne Lake area. It is compressed wood fibre with a factory primer. It fails by swelling and delaminating at the bottom edge and at butt joints once the paint film cracks, which looks quite different from the way real wood rots.
Free quotes. No obligation. We connect Woodstock homeowners with a vetted local soffit and fascia repair crew. We are not a contractor and we do not perform the work ourselves.