A Thoroughly Draining Experience
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
Leakage, as you might be aware, is a woman’s 
Now, before you spit out your drink laughing hysterically, let me just say that I had to quickly improvise, and son-of-a-gun, it actually seems to work pretty good, because the water is too shallow for a cup to be of any use up there.
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The Kitchen Triangle gives me a headache every time I step into it. I hate the cupboards, the knobs, the vinyleum (what little is left of it), the countertops, the powder blue paint that someone saw fit to paint the door trim with, the abysmal backplash tiles and the fact it’s cramped and has no window…I could go on, but I’ll spare you.
Like my houseblogger comrades, I figured I could purchase better quality shingles and stain them myself with the same brand used for the pre-finished shingles. Well, two summers and several snapped clothes lines later, it seems my calculations were a bit off. Or at least I was when I hatched this plan.
My shingles are kind of like that boyfriend who moved into your place without you actually realizing what was happening—until it suddenly dawned on you that every time you turned around, you were tripping over a smelly sports equipment bag or tacky piece of rock memorabilia…or meeting the bottom of your toilet bowl quite unexpectedly in the middle of the night.
What better way to celebrate Earth Day than to reduce, reuse and recycle—and for us, Saturday meant a trip to The Salvage Shop in Toronto.
Incorporating salvaged finds into your home isn’t always the easiest thing to do, and our recent experience with a French door we’d picked up at The Salvage Shop several months ago is a perfect example. My husband spied the door, made of fir and with a gorgeous entry set, and noted that its measurements matched those of a more modern French door we have separating our home’s front hall and dining room.
It’s relatively straightforward to utilize salvaged doors when you’re building new doorways to accommodate a piece you have on hand—we’ve done this successfully several times—but problems can arise when you try to take a door from an old house and retrofit that into another old house.
It was nice of Roy to allow us to return the door—not a lot of places would, especially after that long. What was nicer still (for him, I mean) was that we didn’t have to carry a store credit for very long, because the perfect light for our kitchen was hanging right there beside his head!
But by then, it was already too late. Idiots that we were, we thought it was a squirrel we’d been hearing at first. It was actually our daughter—whose lack of stature gave her a bit of an edge here—who spied the raccoon from the window as its tail end disappeared into the rafters one morning. We left a message with a pest control company before heading off to work, and my husband returned home with some hardware cloth and began to staple it around the roof’s perimeter—until pest control returned our call that evening and mentioned there might be a litter up there. They said they’d be by around five the next evening and would survey the situation—so we left some open space where she seemed to be entering. That night, John and I (wearing sweaters) quietly sat reading in the addition and—surprise, surprise (not really)—heard the mewling of baby raccoons.
As our last resort, we tried the supreme raccoon Piss-Off, filling a large live trap with a delectable smorgasbord and placing it against the exterior wall near where she gained access. In a few hours, not only was she trapped, but we had her where she could easily see her offspring…and they could see her. Now, we just needed to wait. Fortunately, the place we’d located the trap didn’t get much direct sunlight throughout the day, and we’d ensured that there was more than an adequate amount of food and water (which was topped up several times). We also set another trap up beside the mother’s, in case any of her young ones got the courage to venture down to her.
The plan was not without its downside—which we realized right away when the raccoon began clawing at the house wrap—but we resisted moving the trap and took turns being sentinels at the window to keep an eye on things. It was admittedly a bit difficult to watch how agitated the raccoon was at her present situation, but we waited it out, not sleeping all night.
We also plan to install countertop above the appliances that will stretch from wall to wall and will include a utility sink. We found the 
Two Sundays ago, we ran the electrical for the dryer, pulling the wire from the old location out of the walls and thru the floor joists right back to the panel; and completely replacing that with a direct run of new wire leading to the designated laundry location in the mudroom addition. There was a lot of swearing (my husband banging his head while he ran wire through “
After installing some flexible dryer duct and screwing on a couple of outlet plates (we used electrical outlet insulators behind the plates to minimize drafts), we were ready to move the dryer in and hook it all up.
To the best of our knowledge, the house was built around 1915 by a member of the Carnegie family (a prominent Scottish family in the Port Perry area that operated both flour and lumber mills here at the turn of the last century).
Last summer, we ripped out two large cedars that flanked the porch (you can see these in the photo at the right, taken about the time we purchased the house). One’s root system had already displaced a porch pier, and it had to be completely dug up and the pier rebuilt. We used the original bricks to rebuild the pier. The stump of the cedar at the right of the photo remains, because the one planting I refuse to disturb is the beautiful Peegee hydrangea (H. paniculata grandiflora), which is a profusion of white blooms at the end of summer, changing first to green and later, to rich rose and gold tones. It’s a real stunner.