Fun With Water, Part 1: The Leak

Not much has changed in the intervening 2 months, so I figured I’d wait until I had something to say. The leaking problem has only gotten worse since I last posted, though there may be some hope of a happy conclusion.

Last time, I told you about O’Bannon Roofing’s shenanigans and how they essentially didn’t do the job they said they would and blew me off when I asked them to do it correctly. A week or so after that post, I called a new roofer called “4 Seasons Roofing & Siding”. We got an advertisement for them in one of those “Valpak” things you get in the mail with all the coupons, etc. They seemed to have their stuff together, the website was nice, the ad said they were part of the BBB, and so on. I called and left a message explaining our situation and got a call back in a day or two. The guy seemed pretty friendly and down-to-earth. He said that 4 Seasons does most of the roof and siding work when you get Home Depot to build you something, and they even did the roof on the dry cleaners at the end of my block. I explained the whole stupid history of my leak problem and he was pretty blown away. He wondered how it was that they “couldn’t figure out the problem,” since something like that would probably be pretty obvious to anyone who’s done roofing before. I told him that’s what I thought, but I’m not a roofer. He asked me if I wouldn’t mind letting him know who it was that gave me the run around, since he had a few roofers in mind that could possibly pull something like that. When I told him it was O’Bannon, he was shocked. He was under the impression that they usually did a good job and followed up on their work, and never would’ve thought they would pull stunts like that. He said that almost all roofers guarantee their work for a few years at least, regardless of whether the house changes owners or not (unlike what I was told by O’Bannon’s roofers, that once the house changes hands the guarantee is null and void). He said he was sorry I had so much trouble and they’d come out that Saturday afternoon after a job to take a look around.

So, that Saturday, I waited around until the sun went down and no one showed up. Still, he said that they had a job that would go until that afternoon and I figured maybe it went long and it got too late for them to come check it out and whadda ya gonna do? I called them the following Monday to try and reschedule the estimate and left a message with whoever answered the phone. After not hearing anything that week, I tried again. Left another message and still no call back. So, after numerous calls with no reply, we’ve simply given up. It’s quite possible that 4 Seasons Roofing seals your roof with a paste made of gold and crushed diamonds for a measly $5. We’ll never know, because they obviously don’t want our business. Which is too bad, ‘cause I had high hopes for these guys after talking to the main roofer.

So in the meantime, as those of you in the area know, we had some snow. Snow is not a big problem as far as the leak is concerned. Sure, it was tough to get our car out of it’s spot the first time we had that icy snow, since our street is curved like the top half of a large pipe. But a few good pushes on the back bumper and we were in business. No, the snow is no problem. The problem comes in when that snow begins to melt. We get a lot of direct sunlight on our house, which is awesome. Snow at the front of our house is usually gone by the end of the day as long as it’s a sunny day. However, that melting snow made our leak problem worsen tenfold. The bright side? The guestroom closet doesn’t seem to be getting wet anymore. The brighter side? We could finally see exactly where the leak was coming from and how it operates. And now you can, too:
This is the guestroom window as seen from the bathroom. You can see that the water first appears along the line indicated by the arrow. It’s evidently coming from the roof and running under the siding until it gets to the window. It then drips down the window and pools on the outer sill.

















Some of it then seeps through into the inner window sill…
















The rest runs right down the siding to the kitchen window (and wall):






































That’s our doorbell next to “America’s #1 Hot Dog”. It still works, even soaked, and it sounds exactly like my sister’s grandfather clock. When we watch her kids, I always think there’s someone at the door once an hour. We need a regular “ding-dong” type of doorbell someday.

Anyway, so that day when the snow was melting, we had our own little disgusting waterfall right in our own kitchen. The wall next to the window was a little squishy as well. I told all of this to that roofer from 4 Seasons when he called that one time a day or so later, and he had a pretty good idea of what to look for. Maybe it was so easy of a solution that he felt my house didn’t pose him enough of a challenge and was unworthy of his roofing prowess. Oh well. I’ll keep my money, and here’s how…

Just this past Saturday, Jenn’s uncle Billy came by to take a look around. He’s done all kinds of contracting/landscaping type work, including roofing. He brought his bucket of “muck” and first took a look at the mud room roof. There wasn’t much there that looked like an obvious leak to him, but he patched a few areas with his tar stuff. The meteorological phenomena that manifest themselves in our mud room continue to be a mystery, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. We borrowed my next-door neighbor’s 40 foot ladder and Billy went up on the main roof to see how things fared there. He immediately went, “This is where it’s leaking, right? Right above the window?” I said yes and he said, “It looks like someone was up here not too long ago and did a real good job all around he roof except right here. They laid the tape down but didn’t muck over it. It’s like they just ran out of stuff and gave up and went home. I can’t believe they didn’t think this would leak!” So there was about a gap about a foot or so long without anything sealing the flashing to the roof and that’s probably where the water was getting in under the siding the whole time. I wish I had sent a camera up there with him, but I didn’t think of it. Regardless, he patched up the obvious oversight and a few other places and came back down. It did rain later that night, but I had a hard enough time washing a little smudge of that stuff off my hand. He slapped that stuff on real thick, so I’m not worried about it being washed away. We didn’t have time to clean up the kitchen window until the next day, so we’re not sure if it leaked that night. We’ll see when it rains this week. Everyone keep your fingers crossed!!