Ugh.
Finally got myself down into the crawlspace yesterday. As expected, it was several hours of shop-vac'ing for a relatively brief amount of actual work. We got a lucky break: the point at which the water damage was either going to stop (and be annoying but addressable) or keep going (and mean serious structural issues) happens to be right at a floor joist. But not just a normal floor joist; this sucker is three inches thick and made of, as far as I can tell, hard oak. This is the sort of timber that would need to be completely submerged for an extended period of time to take any serious damage; the occasional trickle that may have reached it hasn't even been enough to get its attention.
The repair work would be a lot easier if I could just rip the slider out, take out the affected chunk of wall, and rebuild it all at once. Unfortunately, we've got to live here, so I have to do the repairs one chunk at a time. From the bottom up, with stuff resting on the stuff I'm replacing. Sigh, so be it. There are ways to do this.
The really annoying part is that, of course, this is an old-ish house, and much of the structure was built of even older salvage lumber. There's nothing wrong with that, necessarily. However, it means that every damn board is old-standard measurements, which can't be matched with any newly-bought lumber in existence. (If you're not familiar with lumber dimensions, be aware: a 2x8 is not two inches by eight inches. It's roughly one-and-a-half inches by about seven-and-an-eighth inches. It used to be about one-and-three-quarters by seven-and-a-half, and that's what I've got to match.) I'm going to end up having to buy over the size I need, and rip it down to fit. Doable, but f'ing annoying and a significant addition to the time and effort involved.
Just to add to the fun, I forgot my sample piece this morning, and every 2x10 at Menards was warped, split, or chewed to un-usability. There's going to have to be another Day of Epic Shopping for materials, I fear, before the project can progress. And I don't think it's going to be today; today looks like being yardwork day, before it doesn't matter any more what condition the house is in because the lawn will have eaten it.