towards really not leaking anymore

More than once we’ve thought that roof might not leak anymore. We’re down to one last persistent leak which we think that we’ve found by pulling down part of the ceiling.

Where the porch meets the house.

Most of the leaking was occurring when water made it through a few subtle passages at the spot where the porch meets the house. Spending some time thinking about how the water was moving as it came down the roof and liberally patching this area cut our leak volume way down but didn’t completely solve the problem.

The upstairs hallway.

The leaks have been coming into the hallway upstairs. We’ve taken to putting towels down when rain is called for. We used to have to leave trashcans… On rainy nights the tip-tip-tip of the water dropping into the trashcans was frustrating challenge that plucked at all of our doubts about trying to fix up this house.

Exploratory demolition! (… with freshly scraped walls and the ugly-ass light left over from back when this was rental property [soon to be replaced].)

We’d always joked that we’d eventually get the leak tracked down when pulled the ceiling upstairs, never thinking that it would take that long. As is it, we’ve decided to save the complete works for upstairs for later on down the road and try to fix up what we have. This changed our timeline enough to allow for smaller demolition and repair in the hallway, so we pulled down the crumbly plaster at the leak spot and finally got to see the roof from the inside.

Boards behind a tin roof.

We pulled the plaster when we prepping the hallway for the big cleanup, before we installed the balustrade. We had to wait for rain to happen while we were here to observe the leak in action, though, so it has taken a few weeks to be able to move on this.

We’d been thinking that we’d somehow missed some crevice at the porch-house connection. It appears that everything is ok there, finally. The leak, from the inside, is coming from a 1/4-inch horizontal space between two of the boards that are behind the tin of the roof. All of the boards are spaced like this, the gap isn’t the issue… Crossing the space is also one of the raised ridges of the tin roof. On the outside, there are more than few areas at the ridges where rusting has been repaired over the years.

Now we scrape and clean and patch again and wait for a cycles of rain to see how this works…