Daily Home Renovation Tips

Sexy topic, eh?

While we did have a home inspection before we closed the deal to purchase the 20 year old house that is now our home, no home inspection will catch everything, including ours.

During this past winter we had not one but two water leaks in our dining room. We wrote about one of them back in November  that resulted in massive amount of water leaking from  our bay windows in our dining room onto our new hardwood floor and then into the basement.

In both cases the cause was an ice dam which is the result of melting water from the snow on the roof not being able to go town the down pipe, causing it to back up within the gutter itself, freeze and then more melting slow had no where to go but underneath the shingles on the roof and eventually on the next sunny day into our dining room.

Now, this should not have occurred. First, the primary cause was that the bay window in our dining room goes out too far beyond the wall of the house. It protrudes so far beyond the wall that it extends beyond the fascia. Take a look at the picture below and notice how the top of the window frame extends beyond the off white fascia and ends underneath the actual grey gutter.

If it did not extend beyond the fascia our experts tell us we would not have had the melting ice going into our dining room.

Next, take a look at the picture below. What you are seeing is the former chimney for the non-working fireplace in our house that is about 6 feet further south of the dining room bay window. Yes, it is missing something, don’t you think? It has no gutter.

So what? Well, the absence of a gutter means that water from rain, snow, etc. going down the roof falls straight down and will eventually compromise the brickwork and house foundation. As well, that small piece of gutter on the left side of the picture is the same one that the bay window from the dining room is underneath. So, the water from that part of the roof has no where to escape except as you can see from the white water stains on the left brick in the picture, down the side of the house. 

We only learned later that the dining room bay window is pushing upwards the gutter that is directly above it, meaning that when water is coming from the roof onto that small part of gutter you see on the left of the above picture, the water has no where to go except over the side and onto the brick.

One more need on this side of the house, shall we. Take a look at the following picture.

 Remember the gutter that is on top of the dining room bay window? Well, this is the only down spout for that very long 30 foot gutter. Look where this down spout goes? No where, right? It does not take too much snow in the winter for the snow to be higher than the bottom of the end of the down spout. Guess what happens when there is snow around the bottom of the down spout? That’s right, the water from the roof will freeze in the downspout, which will work it’s way all the way up the downspout to the gutter and cause that water to start to freeze, causing an ice dam, and so on.

Clearly we need something done this summer to recify this situation. Next time we will look at the other area of the gutters on the house that is causing us grief.

To select the next article in this series, simply select this link to Part 2.