October 10, 2004

A Roof Over Our Heads

And the home maintenance saga continues. When we last blogged (this is the imperial "we"), the gas lines had been leaking and Archi found a plumber who fixed them. Now that the gas lines aren't leaking, the roof is.

Before we closed on our house, we had a home inspection. The inspector (and the bank) insisted that the roof that covers our office -- an addition to the original structure of the house -- had to be replaced. The sellers hired a roofer and they replaced that part of the roof. It passed inspection and we thought nothing more about it. Until today.

This morning, I was leaving to teach CCD (Sunday school to you non-Catholics) and noticed brown stains on the ceiling of the office. I summoned Archi-Sapper and we inspected them more closely. It appears that the tar from the roof is pushing through the ceiling in some places. Further, at 8:30 this morning there were indentations in the ceiling where you could tell water was accumulating from Tropical Storm Matthew.

I had to head out and teach my class (which went well), so Archi-Sapper stayed behind and moved important stuff out of the office. He went to the hardware store and bought a ladder, buckets and visqueen. He used the visqueen to cover the roof (after he bailed out the standing water) and to cover the carpet in the office from dripping tar. The buckets are catching the dripping tar and water, as we now have a rather large crack in the middle of the ceiling with a hole in it, caused by the pressure from the standing water. *sigh*

Archi also called the guy who sold us the house (he's a partner in a company that buys houses, fixes them up and then flips them for a profit). The guy was very nice, as he was when we bought the house, and said he's going to bring us the warranty papers for the roofing work and he's going to call the roofer and have them come over tomorrow to get started on repairing it. Tellingly, he said he had received a few other phone calls this morning from people who purchased property from him who had leaky roofs as a result of shoddy roof installations from this same guy. While I'm not thrilled about letting Mr. Magoo repair our roof (especially since he didn't get it right the first time), I'm also not interested in spending a bunch of money we currently don't have to get a competent roofer to come over and install a new roof. I repeat: Ah, the joys of home ownership.

Posted by Kitty at October 10, 2004 12:55 PM

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