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It's Not the Snow, It's the Thaw...

Yesterday evening, I hauled myself up the front steps after work and came face-to-face with a waterfall on one side of our new front door.  Brown water was pouring out from the beadboard ceiling above the front porch and down the face of the stucco. 

I charged upstairs to discover that the gutter that collects water (and melting ice/snow) between two peaks in the roofline had become clogged and then had frozen over.  As the temperatures rose from the high 20's to the mid 30's, the ice and snow began slowly melting.  This had formed a pond behind the ice dam of our gutter which was backing up under the shingles and down into the roof cavity below.  (This is a picture AFTER it  was cleared of most of the ice...but you get the idea.  Think of this space being filled with water like a small pond.)

No water was technically in the house, but I was still concerned.  If there WAS water soaking the wood framing behind the stucco, we could face some major problems when temperatures drop below freezing again.  Water expands the wood, pushes against the stucco, cracks the stucco, stucco begins to fall off of the house.  With visions of this in my brain, I seriously contemplated hauling my portly body out onto the roof.  (Hear that thud?  That was my mom fainting and falling over in alarm because she KNOWS I would do it.)

Luckily, Aaron volunteered to brave the roof for me.  Not once, but FOUR times.  Three times last night and once this morning.  Armed with a snow shovel, a hammer, a chisel and a bag of salt, he attempted to break up the solid mass of ice a bit at a time in order to clear the gutter.  He is my HERO!

(Normally, I would hate to put salt up there and then chance that it would corrode the metal of the gutter itself, but we really needed to melt the ice quickly before another freeze and I wasn't going to send him out there with a hair dryer.  So we will try to rinse it off as best as we can before the next freeze.)

In an insomnia-fueled trip to the front porch at 3 am, I noticed that we were still leaking some water from under the beadboard and it irked me to no end because there was little I could do about it at that time of night.  And not able to get onto the roof myself.  I took note of some funny little wet spots on the wood at random intervals and saw them again this morning before I waddled out for the bus to work.

As I sat on the bus thinking about all of this, it hit me.  I'm going to bet that the water is still up there.  Above the beadboard.  It has collected there and is only slowing draining in the few spots it can get through.  I needed to drill a HOLE in the beadboard and drain that out.  That explains the soaked spots on the wood ABOVE where the water is draining out at the edge.  There is a pool of water up there and it is soaking through random weak spots in the beadboard.

What a mess.  Can't use a power drill (water + electric drill = nope) so I'll have to find an old awl in the basement.

Snow.  Lovely.  Until it thaws.

p.s.  Aaron beat me home from work again tonight and was able to clear the gutter.  The water flowed out pretty quickly after that.  So, no "weep holes" needed.  But we will have to figure out a way to clean up this stucco in the spring.  How gross.

Posted by jeanne on December 15, 2005 at 6:13 PM (6)

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