Woodpecker Hole Repair in Woodstock, GA
Woodpecker holes in fascia around Woodstock are usually a carpenter bee problem. Fixing the board without the bees means the birds come back next spring.
Free quotes, usually the same day. Tell us what you are looking at and we pass it straight to a local crew.
Holes punched through the fascia, often a cluster of them along one board, sometimes torn into a long ragged trench. It looks like vandalism and homeowners reasonably treat it as a bird problem. It is usually not.
The actual sequence. In April and May, carpenter bees drill into soft exposed wood around the roofline. The entry is a startlingly neat round hole about the diameter of a finger. The bee then turns ninety degrees and tunnels along the grain, sometimes a foot or more, and lays larvae in chambers down the tunnel. Later in the season the woodpeckers find them. A woodpecker can hear larvae moving inside a board, and it will rip the face off the wood to get at them.
So the big damage is the second act. The bees made a hole you could plug with a dowel. The bird turned it into a repair. And the reason it recurs in the same spot year after year is that carpenter bees return to established tunnels and extend them, which is also why the board eventually goes hollow inside while looking mostly fine outside.
Cherokee County has a heavy population of both. Pileated woodpeckers, the big ones with the red crest, do the most dramatic damage because of their size, and they are common in the wooded neighborhoods on the Towne Lake side of Woodstock and out toward Ball Ground. Where there is mature timber next to a house with exposed wood trim, this is a question of when rather than whether.
Repairing it properly means three things, in this order. Deal with the bees first, because sealing live larvae into a board simply produces new exit holes and a fresh round of birds. Then repair or replace the wood, which for a few clean holes means filling with an exterior epoxy filler rather than caulk, and for a tunnelled or torn board means replacing the section. Then paint, thoroughly, because the third step is the one that prevents the whole cycle.
Paint does the prevention work here and the reason is specific rather than cosmetic. Carpenter bees select bare, weathered or stained softwood and will nearly always pass over a well-painted surface. Sealing the holes and leaving the board unpainted is the repair that fails. So is filling with caulk, which stays soft, shrinks, and is trivial for a bee to reopen the following spring.
There is a material answer to this too. Carpenter bees do not tunnel into fiber cement or PVC trim, and they do not tunnel into aluminum. On a house that has been hit repeatedly on the same elevation, replacing that run in a material the bees cannot use ends the problem permanently and often costs less than the third repair would have.
Timing matters more here than in most exterior work. The right window is late summer after the new generation has emerged, or early spring before nest building starts. Doing the carpentry in the middle of May means working around active bees and sealing some of them in, which produces a call back in six weeks.
One legal note worth knowing before anyone suggests otherwise: woodpeckers are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, so the answer to a woodpecker is always exclusion, deterrence and removing the food source rather than anything else.
What it costs
Prices here are the local market range, not a quote. The full breakdown, and what moves a number up or down, is on the Woodstock soffit and fascia cost guide.
How a repair visit runs, from the first call to the rehung gutter, is on the soffit and fascia repair in Woodstock, GA page.
Related work
Common questions
Will they come back if I just fill the holes?
Almost certainly. Woodpeckers are usually after carpenter bee larvae inside the wood, so patching the holes leaves the food in place and the bird comes back for it. Treat the galleries first, let the treatment work, then fill and paint.
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-story Woodstock house has roughly 120 to 150 linear feet of fascia, and a two-story 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 spills down the strip of fascia hidden behind the gutter, which is the one part of the board that never gets repainted. 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 fiber 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, usually the same day. Tell us what you are looking at and we pass it straight to a local crew.