dianaschnuth

Seems we get to repair at least one part of the house every year. This year (so far), it’s the roof. Or, more specifically, the boots on all three roof vents. At least it wasn’t as epic a problem as we kept convincing ourselves it might be.

It all started a few weeks ago, when the rain just wouldn’t quit. Both my husband and I heard a very slow and steady drip coming from the bathroom ceiling, to the left side of the vanity. I didn’t think anything of it until one day when the rain was coming down hard, and the drip sound was coming every two seconds or so.

Of course, I completely forgot to message Dear Hubby or leave him a note about it, so the problem only compounded during the day’s torrential downpour. By the time I gave my son his bath that evening, the ceiling looked like this:

I knew my husband was on his break at work, so I texted him the picture and apologized for forgetting to give him a heads-up earlier. There were two yellowish drips barely dangling the ceiling, and one drip had hit the counter, but mostly it was just the paint bubbling up with water behind it — and that one-drip-per-second sound, reminding me of what could be going on in our ceiling. Aaron agreed to call our go-to contractor the next morning.

He was given a reference to a roofing company, which he then called to schedule an appointment to come out and take a look. Luckily, these people would be able to assess and repair the same day. Unluckily, their first available appointment wasn’t for another week and a half. That was twelve days of trying not to worry about things we couldn’t do anything about. Twelve days of staring at the bubbles on the ceiling, looking at the weather forecast, hoping the solution would be a simple one when the time came.

As it turns out, it was.

As the roofers explained to my husband in words and pictures on The Big Day, our roof is sloped less than your standard roof, but the boots around the plumbing vents were the standard ones. So, the angle of the boots was all wrong for the angle of the pipes versus the roof slope, allowing water to pool up in the gap behind.

After the roofers left to go get the appropriate parts (and went MIA for a couple of hours), and after kissing several hundred dollars of our emergency fund goodbye, our roof now sports the appropriate plumbing boots for all three vents. Hooray!

Our bathroom ceiling still sports some paint bubbles, but that’s just cosmetic. Maybe we’ll repaint it… –Oh, who am I kidding? 🙂