I have a house in southern California, built in 1926, on concrete slab. The floor is plaster over the slab, vinyl (or whatever the old semi-flexible stuff is) tile over the plaster. The walls are lath & plaster, standard stuff.
In exploring some sagging areas of the floor in preparation for converting to wood floors, I find that some of the interior walls were framed with 4x4s (or 2 2x4s, I can’t tell) which were embedded in the slab; it looks like they poured the slab around them, with the 4x4s in contact with the ground below the slab. By now, the wood 4x4s are essentially gone, to dry rot or termites, and the vertical studs are resting on small ledges of concrete slab on either side of where the 4×4 used to be. These don’t seem to be loadbearing walls, so I’m not too worried about immediate failure, but something has to be done.
What I’ve considered doing is removing the baseboards and lath behind, to access the rotted wood, then either remove the rotted wood and backfill with concrete, or if the wood isn’t completely gone, to consolidate it with low-viscosity epoxy.
Comments, anyone? Who would I get to do this sort of job? it isn’t exactly listed in the yellow pages.