When we last checked in, our plucky heroine had been suctioning water off the roof of her house with a turkey baster...but her efforts were in vain, and she was bettered by the drain.

Let me tell you that in the days following that first episode I spent a lot of time on my roof, actually trying to make it leak again—since the ceiling was already toasted. After combing every inch of the roof and ascertaining that there was absolutely nothing to suggest the water was entering through the membrane, we focused on the drain—quickly pouring buckets of water down it to try to simulate a deluge…and…nothing. We tried pouring buckets of water on the seams around the drain, thinking there must be a weakness somewhere. Not a drop.
We decided to wait for the next significant rainfall…and went through several with the ceiling remaining dry as a bone. So, despite numerous attempts to get the ceiling to show more evidence of water it seemed we’d hit a brick wall…

But of course, you all know we didn’t:

THIS is what we found after I hastily scrawled my last post over a month ago:

Had we continued with a few more buckets down the drain a couple of weeks earlier, we might have found the weakness sooner. The drain was pretty much detached from the pipe. What’s missing in this picture is the plastic bag (?) that was wrapped around the point where the drain attached to the pipe. We also discovered that there was no strapping to attach the pipe to the plywood above—it was just floating in space, waiting to fail.

Since we were in demo mode, we decided to take down all of the ceiling drywall out towards the outside wall, where we knew there was once another roof drain. A roofing company that had worked on this part of the roof a few years back—right after we’d bought the house—had ‘de-commissioned’ the drain, explaining it wasn’t necessary to have two of them.
There are no sufficient expletives to convey what my feelings were towards this particular roofing firm when I stuck my head up into the ceiling with my camera to take a shot of this fine piece of workmanship:

Not only did these *#@%!s steal the drain that was located here, they didn’t even bother to patch the resulting hole with plywood before putting the membrane on top! That we didn’t put our foot through this area while we were up there examining the roof was Fate’s one small consideration in our favour. I did manage to shove my hand into the open end of the pipe to confirm that…yes, they left that open.

The good news is that the problem’s now solved—and we’ve had some very heavy weather over the past month and a half to put us at ease. The downside was that in trying to track down that leak problem prior to the ‘final assault’, we ripped apart some other areas of the house, which created additional projects we’ve been tackling this summer with every spare minute of time and money.

Tomorrow is my annual 25th birthday, and I asked my husband not to buy me a gift this year (like he could afford one, anyway!). Instead, we are pooling our resources and taking our daughter to Niagara Falls for a night at the Great Wolf Lodge. I think we owe it to her, since we’ve frittered away most of the summer on home improvements. We’ve never taken a vacation before, and to tell you the truth, I’m looking forward to getting away from this house—even if it’s for only a day!

technorati tags: houseblog, DIY, renovation