Some pictures of the rotted area
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in the middle of the hallway floor, which we noticed as we were viewing our house on a rainy Saturday, with an eye to buying it. The ceiling sheetrock above was broken through and obviously had been wet previously. Later, I thought I remembered the ceiling sheetrock was still wet, my wife thought it wasn’t. The house inspector’s report said he walked around the outside of the roof but didn’t mention any obvious active roof faults. Well, the house was otherwise just about exactly what we’d had in mind, so we negotiated a $1,500 repair allowance into the contract and bought it anyway.
We hired a general contractor to pull out and replace the broken sheetrock. A couple of days later, I got a call at work—“come by at lunchtime, you need to see what we found.” I went by, and the workers showed me the underside of the roof. The leak(s) were where the gable from the original roof met the flat roof of the addition, which created a valley with a wonderful place for water to pool up and sit and sit and sit. Somebody (probably the cheap-John roofer the previous owner hired—did I say this was a rental property for a long time before we bought it?) had been in a hurry the last time the house was roofed, and they’d driven shingle nails through all the built-up roofing layers, penetrating it right underneath this valley area and ruining the roof’s integrity and ability to keep the water out. And whatever had gone on, had gone on for a long time—a chunk of decking was rotted away.
Some pictures of the rotted area
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The GC bid $3,600 to subcontract a roofer for us who’d replace the built-up roof on the back half of the house. The real estate agent said the GC’s quote sounded way out of line to him and he didn’t think a whole roof was necessary anyway, that it could be patched. He got some other roofers to come over and look at it. Two of them agreed that the whole roof needed replacement and quoted in the neighborhood of $1,500, the third (who was the real estate agent’s general fix-it contractor, and not a professional roofer—we should have suspected something, right there) said he believed it could be patched. We contracted with the third one to patch the rotten area, for $400.
The contractor started work the Thursday before Christmas (we wanted to get through since we were expecting company for Christmas—thank God something else came up and they didn’t come to visit after all). He pulled off the rotten area and then discovered that the water damage was far more extensive than he’d expected, and a new roof was necessary after all. On Friday he quoted us $1,250 to put on a new bitumen membrane roof. We told him to get moving pronto. He said he’d start on Monday if it didn’t rain, and it should take him two days, then he tarped over the hole in the roof and went home for the weekend.
Saturday morning a violent cold front blew in—and I do mean blew. Torrents of rain were pushed by a 15 to 20-mile wind, and the tarps were completely inadequate. Water poured into the house in several steady streams, both inside and outside the walls. We mopped and wet-vac’d up as much as we could, but it was all we could do to keep the water confined. It invaded the carpet in one of the back bedrooms, and soaked the floor drywall in the hallway and central bathroom, so the paint developed huge blisters full of rainwater and the vinyl tile curled and buckled. The contractor came out and tried to cover up the hole more securely with plastic sheeting, but he was outclassed by the weather, too.
The rain cleared up on Sunday afternoon, but of course everything was far too wet to work on Monday—and Tuesday was Christmas Eve. Ain’t nobody’s crew willing to come out to start in on our roof. Christmas Day it rained again—more water under the carpet and in the walls, more mopping and vacuuming. I estimated that by this point, we’d bailed a hundred gallons of water out of the house between Saturday morning and Wednesday night.
Finally it dried out enough that the contractor could get back on the job the Saturday after Christmas. He finished up on Tuesday, and the insurance adjuster came out to survey the damage. He made notes on his clipboard and went away again. January 3rd it rained yet again. We found out where the leaks were that didn’t get sealed. The contractor came out and put on more compound, and told us that we’d continue to have trouble until we re-did the superannuated, exposed A/C ductwork that penetrated the flat roof in two places.
We called the GC, and he got an HVAC contractor to come out. The HVAC guy looked at our situation, and said there’s no hope except to replace all the exposed work and then build a “doghouse” enclosure over it. $800, please. It took him half a week to install the new ductwork, and then the contractor came back and sealed (so to speak) around the ducts and enclosure. Mr. Contractor gave us the warranty, took his check and left. We were happy to wave bye-bye.
While the HVAC/roofer pas de deux was going on, it rained some more, and more water came in around the duct in the other back bedroom and ruined the carpet in there. The GC sent someone over to pull up and dry out the carpet in both bedrooms while we figured out what to do next.
The insurance company agreed to pay for the damage to the drywall, tile, and carpet, since that was consequential to the roof mess, but refused to pay for the roof since we’d done that part ourselves on purpose. Fine, that’s what we’d expected them to say anyway. They sent a check and a policy cancellation notice.
I went out to Home Depot and bought the engineered hardwood planking we planned to use to replace the carpet, and vinyl to replace the buckled stuff in the bathrooms. Thank you, $1,600, please. Then I discovered a $1,500 mistake in my checking account (don’t ask), which ate the rest of the insurance settlement and the end of our construction fund too. So much for hiring somebody to install the flooring. Three months later we finally got enough money together enough to be able call the GC and have him send someone to fix the drywall and replace the ceiling. $1,300, please.
Our friend Erich and I laid the hardwood flooring ourselves, one bedroom the following April and the other in August. When we finally ripped out the mildewed, by-now-rotten carpeting in the second bedroom, we discovered a quarter-inch-wide crack running across the foundation slab, and that the floor slanted in different directions on each side of the crack. This made laying the planking over one side of the room an interesting job, but in the end we got it done to where I could stand it.
And that fall it set in to rain again. And then the roof set in to leaking again. We called the contractor, but he had since been sued by the insurance company to recover damages, and he refused to do anything about anything unless I wrote him a letter releasing him from all present and future liability, which he could wave under the insurer’s nose. Not being a complete nitwit, I refused to do that. He refused to do anything further about fixing the roof. I let it go at that, since we didn’t have money to go hiring lawyers and I wasn’t sure he’d have any assets worth suing for after the insurers got through with him, anyway.
It kept raining. Water leaked in around the A/C ducts in both back rooms, got under the new flooring in one room so that one section curled up in about nineteen directions, and would have to be replaced. In the process of trying to find what went wrong and what we could do about it in the meantime, I got up on the roof and found that the HVAC man had done a completely incompetent job of installing the ductwork and box, that because he hadn’t built a foundation for the box it was cutting through the surface of the roof and making even more leaks, and inside air was escaping back to the outside through a ten-inch by one-inch gap that he’d left for no reason I could figure, around one duct.
We started trying to get roofers (real roofers, and not just people who sold life insurance and put on roofs in their spare time) to come tell us what it would take to fix the roof and how much it would cost. This is far easier said than done in high summer, when every roofer in captivity is already working on commercial jobs, which are far more lucrative than residential jobs, and already have more work than they can do so they don’t really care whether they come to look at your roof. Through a combination of persuasion and threats, we finally get three people to come and look. They all agreed that the original contractor had no more idea than a giraffe of how to put on a roof, because he’d left the (flat) roof with a negative slope so that water puddled up in the middle of it instead of running off to the gutters, he’d used chipboard for decking instead of proper plywood, and he’d failed to get the joints between the bitumen strips hot enough with his torch, so they hadn’t sealed properly and let water get underneath. They also agreed that whatever happened, I’d have to have the roof re-engineered so it had a small positive slope. These were about the only things they agreed on. Roofer #1 and Roofer #3 agreed on the method, but #1 said it would require tearing off the whole roof and starting from scratch, while #3 thought that he could open up only one patch that appeared to be the place where the water was actually penetrating the roof, patch the rotted decking under that, and close it up. After that, they wanted to use tapered insulation and then put a new surface over the whole affair to create a positive roof slope. Roofer #2 also thought that a complete tear-off was needed, but he wanted to change the slope of the underlayment and then lay a new roof, and solve the problem that way. For this privilege, Roofer #1 bid a cost of $6,000, saying that this was a wild-assed guess and it might run anything from $5,000 to $7,000, Roofer #2 bid $1,600, and Roofer #3 bid $4,700.
About that time, the general lack of money intervened and we had to let everything just sit—which didn’t please us, but there wasn’t much to be done about it. Fortunately (at least in this respect) the summer of 2000 was an absolutely desiccating drought, so we didn’t have more damage until fall, when it set in to do some serious raining again. Every time it rained, more water came in; over a period of months, we lost a couple of quilts to mildew that were stored in a cabinet which turned out to be where one leak wanted to go, a number of books were ruined by rain leakage, the paint inside the closets peeled and mildewed, the cabinet walls rotted, the ceiling sheetrock dribbled down on our heads as it dissolved by microns. We kept buckets handy and caught as much of the drips as we could, but the damage continued.
Finally, in December 2000 I gritted my teeth and called the roofer who had bid the least, and told him to come out and get his crew working (MasterCard bridge loan, here we come). He had them out in a few days, and they tore off the mis-built HVAC doghouse, pulled up all the old mess of roof, discovered the chipboard decking had rotted completely through in two or three places (no surprise here; we could feel the holes through the roof surface), and within a few days, dodging periodic rain showers, replaced the rotted decking and some rotted fascia and laid a whole new roof. After that we got in a different HVAC guy to build a new doghouse with proper founding and ventilation so water wouldn’t pool and sit underneath, and the roofer then came back and finished up sealing around the ducts where they penetrate the roof plane. At that point, we thought were were almost home and dry, or at least vigorously toweling ourselves off, and that replacing wallboard and flooring was soon to happen.
The rotted decking and the ductwork, as it came to light
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Over Memorial Day weekend, 2001, our friend Chris and her son Ben came to help us pull out and replace the drywall. We didn’t get nearly as much done as we’d hoped, for several reasons: the demolition was nowhere near complete, I didn’t have the network cabling pulled and stubbed out, we had to figure out how to manage the twelve-foot sheets of wallboard we used on the ceiling (they weigh eighty-five pounds each, and are hell to put up while fighting gravity, even with the help of a wallboard lift and a high-speed drywall screwdriver).
Images of the chaos created during demolition
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Some of the things we came across as we worked were little short of astonishing (in the sense we had no idea why the house hadn’t burned down or fallen to bits long before now). The most shocking might be when we found a drywall screw driven through a live electric cable! We scraped away execrable drywall “treatments” from the drywall we didn’t pull down, in preparation for repainting with something that actually has personality to it (currently, a pale morning yellow is under discussion), and put up new R-11 roll insulation in the ceiling to replace the pounds of hideous, black, filthy blown-in cellulose and bits of half-rotten R-11 already in place.
The screwed cable, scraping, and insulation
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By the end of the weekend, we had the ceiling up in the nursery, and in July I managed to get the cabling done and the nursery wall up on my own; my wife did the taping and is working on floating the mud over the joints. And then we got stopped again when we discovered the duct in the nursery still leaked, and the water was migrating along the top of the wallboard to nearby screw-holes; there was no point in more inside work until we were sure the roof is tight.
The insulation in place, and the finished ceiling
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In August I finally got onto the roof with some flashing, a pair of tin snips, a rivet gun, and a bucket of roofing cement, and built a collar around the duct penetration going into the nursery, which I anchored to the roof with several strips of foil tape and a layer of cement, and to the duct with a series of rivets. I also caulked around all the seams in the neighborhood of the duct, on the theory that the water might be getting in someplace the seal wasn’t good, and running between the layers to the duct before it came through. This seems to be the right track; the leak, while not yet stopped, is far, far slower than it used to be. The next time I can get a week with no rain in the forecast, I’m going back up to slap on another layer of cement over the seams, as well as dismantle some of the doghouse and use the foil tape to seal over several places where the HVAC ductwork is leaking heated and cooled air to the outdoors, to the extreme detriment of our household budget.
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Text and photographs copyright ©1998-2001 by Sam Waring. All rights reserved.
Revised: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 at 03:09:38 UTC