Well this blog has gotten off to a bit of a bum start hasn’t it? I guess I really haven’t had much to say. I never really do have all that much to say. I guess that’s why I’m so quiet. Only speak when necessary…

Being first time home owners we didn’t know what we’d be up against. Our first year was a trying one. Last summer and into the fall/winter we had two projects. First we noticed some discoloration in the ceiling of our dining room. We knew it was water damage so up to the roof I went to look at what was going on. Turns out the leak had been there a while. I could see where a previous owner had laid down roll shingles atop the old shingles and then it was patched with tar on the corner where they apparently thought the water was coming in. I noticed the slope of the roof was extremely mild, almost non-existent and I could see that there was a low area where the plywood had begun to sag some. Being that we are teeter-tottering between being in poverty and just being poor we didn’t have the money to hire someone to fix it. I had to tackle this myself and I had little clue how to go about it, short of having a class on architectural drafting at ITT over 10 years prior. I looked through my old school books, but got next to nothing out of them so I was left to “just do it” like Nike has taught me all these years. Now I don’t wear Nike mind you, but I’ve gotten some good use out of their slogan in my day.

So you might be wondering about now, how does a fairly poor guy deal with a leaky roof? I had three options as I saw it. I could buy a bucket of tar and pour it on the roof over my dining room, I could remove and replace the shingles in the area, or I could do a “full-depth reconstruction” of the roof in the problem area. I opted for option 3. I didn’t have the money for the “full-depth reconstruction” of the whole room or I would have done that, but I was able to swing it on just the problem area even though I had a feeling it would not suffice.

I started out by removing the shingles. That was a lot of fun let me tell you. Especially where they had been sealed to the flashing (the metal stuff around the perimeter of the roof for those who forgot to buy “Roofing for Dummies”). I then pulled up the old plywood and replaced it with a brand new sheet, after spraying a bug killing agent underneath due to several sightings of what I believe were carpenter ants (That would explain the mushy beam I left for dead during this project). After the plywood was down I sealed it with some black gooey stuff around the edges , or seams, and put down a couple layers of roofing felt (the soft black paper-like material you may have seen on roofs, or is that rooves?, just before they lay down the shingles). After that was attached I tacked down some new shingles. Then it was the waiting game. We would know after the next rain whether or not the operation was successful…

Guess what? It rained and no more water was leaking, at least not into the dining room where we could see it happening. Apparently there was still some getting in, just not enough to actually leak through the ceiling until… about a year later! Gulp!

Sometime after that I was sitting at work, kind of like I am right now, and my wife calls and says “the water isn’t working!”. Oh great. One project, coming up. Light on the mayo please.

Due to time constraints I won’t go into detail on that one yet. Maybe in the next post. To make a long story short, your well isn’t always where you might think it would be…