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| Rotted roof materials! |
One wet day last May, I woke up to find a puddle on top of the stove.
There was a gentle drip, drip, drip coming from what could only be the range fan vent.
My husband John was away visiting his daughter. As I cleaned up the water and put a pan under the line of drips, I recalled the winter we were getting our city house ready to sell.
Examining our failing exterior siding, Jake, the home inspector we’d hired, said the siding was pretty much a lost cause.
“Couldn’t we just repair it?” I asked.
“Think like a raindrop,” said Jake.
Oh, so Zen! A nice way of saying: any tiny drop of water, given any opening, will work its way into your walls or ceiling. And those small, damp spots you can’t see will only get larger, until you have a Really. Big. Problem:
Dry rot.
Back to last May and the puddle: I waited until John came home before I told him about the leak. He didn’t look any happier than Jake the inspector. Especially when I showed him the damp shelf above the stove, and the water stains around the vent pipe.
We felt kind of helpless, though. We didn’t have the money for a new roof!
We had always planned to replace it down the road, hopefully in a couple of years, after we’d paid off our mortgage and could save the funds. Now, however, there was just no way.
So, John and I being sort of wait and see kind of people, we waited and “see’d.”
Summertime, and our dry season came along, and we didn’t think about the leak. Or tried not to.
Then came October, with a whole lot of rain. I mean, record precipitation. I couldn’t remember a rainier fall. And the leak was back. In spades.
The cupboard above the range was wet all the time. We piled towels around the stove vent pipe, which, after every rainstorm were soaked. So we’d have to swap in dry towels, and they’d get soaked too, before the wet ones could dry.
After a couple of weeks of towel-swapping, I said to John, “We can’t keep doing this.”
He looked bleak. We both knew winter would only bring more rain. More and more and more.
We had to bite the bullet: get the roof repaired. And find the money somehow.
I did some research, and discovered our shingle roof only had a life of about 15-20 years, and we were in year 19. The cost new roof—we had our hearts set on a metal roof—would probably be at least $20,000.
I called my brother Ty, the Wood Guy, who’d just replaced the roof on his lakeside cabin. He advised that it was hard to get roof repairs, but if you ask for an estimate for a new roof, you might have better luck.
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| Replacing the roof underlayment |
We found a reputable roofing company, and followed Ty’s advice. The company was up for a repair, and they sent their sales guy out that day for a new roof estimate. He took one look at our damp spot above the stove and shook his head. “That’s pretty bad.”
Okay, he was a salesman; of course he would say our leak was bad, but still. John and I could see the writing on the wall. We knew about this leak…what if there were more, that just hadn’t yet shown up as damp spots on the ceiling.
Did we want to find out the hard way, and have the ceiling fall in?
Long story short: we signed a contract for a roof replacement—the metal roof we’d dreamed about. The cost had to come out of the funds we’d saved for our old age. Meaning, our really, really old age.
But what else could we do?
The repair was a gigantic tarp covering the leaking vent, attached to our existing, marginal shingles with special roofing tacks, and it extended all the way up to the roofline. The cost: $850.
On the positive side, the tarp took care of the problem.
But of course the company couldn’t guarantee this repair: a tarp was only a short-term fix, and even shorter, if a bad Northeaster came along, and blew the whole thing off!
The materials came in the first week of December. Four sturdy roofing guys showed up right away, who worked from early morning to the very last photon in the afternoon. They were a really great bunch of young guys, very polite and conscientious.
The crew had to replace no less than 21 panels of rotting OMC (that’s the plywood-ish kind of wood product under your shingles or metal panels). Those 21 replacement panels, John and I estimate, added up to about 1/4 of our roof.
All those rotten spots in the existing OMC told the real story: that had we not sprung for a new roof, our old shingle roof would have surely sprung more leaks all over the place.
It was an interesting process—which came with some surprises. Like when John and I were making breakfast in the kitchen one morning. All of a sudden, there was a suction sound overhead, and the guys lifted out our skylight! Nothing but blue sky above us, like the song says.
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| It was close to Christmas, but this isn’t Santa! |
The next day, the guys took off the bathroom fan vents. It was very interesting, to be using the bathroom with a hole in the roof right over your head, listening to the rapid patter of Spanish coming from a few feet away!
Despite the huge hole in our savings, John and I are delighted with the new roof. No more leaks, wet towels, or worry. The cost was considerably higher than the $20,000 I was hoping for.
Still, you can’t get away from the math: 20 k is a lot less than you’d spend having to rebuild the whole shebang.
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| Finished metal roof, with the cool new woodstove pipe flashing! |
The alternative means John and I would have been singing another song: “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”!
All the activity with the roofing crew pretty much scared the local wildlife away from our yard. But shortly before they arrived, I had an unforgettable encounter with a barred owl.
“An owl glided low across the lane, right in front of me, to a huge old Douglas fir next to the road. With a sweep of its majestic wings, the owl settled on a limb about 12 feet off the ground…”
You can read “Of Owls and Empaths” in my December 2024 newsletter!
