The joys of home ownership

[jducoeur]

We love the house dearly, but I think the honeymoon is over. This week, it developed its first real Problem.

Far as I can tell, the issue is ice dams. It looks like the front gutters have frozen solid, and they don't get much sun; the upper roof, however, does get a bit. So the melt comes down the roof, hits the gutter, can't get through it, and backs up into the flashing. Along most of the front, this isn't too terrible: it comes out the back of the flashing and runs down as icicles. Unfortunately, though, one of the things under that flashing is that lovely front bay window of ours.

So the past few days have been bucket-focused. Fortunately, the drips are well-behaved: there are about five distinct spots where it is coming through, and we've put big buckets under all of them. No significant damage from the drips yet, but the situation can't persist in the long run.

If the weather predictions come true, I suspect the problem will ease on Sunday -- it should get warm enough to melt the gutters, at which point I expect the worst of the problem to go away. But come spring, we'll have to look into a better solution. I suspect that will involve restructuring of that gutter, but I'm not sure of the details yet.

Oh, well. Compared to the old house (whose roof got ripped off in a hurricane, producing one of the worst weeks for me ever), this is pretty minor stuff. It's still a nice house, just showing the warts now that we've been in it a while...

Comments

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

As I mentioned above, my roofrake is about 17' long; it reaches my first floor eaves, maybe some a little higher than that (I have a complex roof). One *could* buy two of them -- each is 4 4' sections, plus the rake part -- to make a longer rake, but it's pretty darn awkward to handle as-is, and requires a fair bit of upper-body strength as well. I'm not at all sure I could handle a 34' rake, and you're a tad smaller than I am.

I would NOT want to handle one from on top of a ladder.

The first time I had to sweep snow from an icedam location, I used a regular ladder, leaned against the gutter. In the spring, I had to replace the gutter, which I had squashed with the ladder.

As for why we have gutters and downspouts, some early houses don't. It's not at all clear that all houses need them. There are a number of other products out there that will divert some or all of the water away from the foundation.

If it's your DOWNSPOUT freezing, rather than your gutter, perhaps heat tape would help. Also, perhaps your downspout has some sort of partial blockage?

[matildalucet.livejournal.com]

I think it must be something like 30' from my driveway straight up to the edge of my roof (two and a half stories?) so it doesn't sound like roof rake is in my immediate future. Hooray? And if chiefoperator gets sufficiently concerned, he can climb the ladder and see what's what up there, which I gather he would prefer over having me up the side of our house anyway.

The worst downspout is not really entirely intact, I think, and should probably be removed or replaced in the spring. It's on a problematic corner of the house that really should be renovated/rebuilt anyway but we never quite seem to get around to it. It has Issues. I will keep the heat tape in mind as a stopgap because there is something vaguely scary about having a downspout that seems to full of ice, at least as far up as we can reach without a ladder.