ice dams
In the late Fall of 2006 the roof on the addition to our house started to leak a little bit as we were heading out to church on a lovely Sabbath morning. "We'll check it out later when we get home," said the husband (and the wife agreed).Three hours later we came home to a huge hole in the roof where the soggy drywall had fallen down onto the carpet and spread a mess everywhere. About six months later my hubby and our dear friend Stephen finally got up there and fixed things up (we had temporarily patched it through the Winter). They not only replaced the drywall, but they ripped the whole area out all the way to the sky. It needed to be done over completely.
When the initial damage had been done Geo climbed onto the roof to find the cause of the problem. "Ice dams," he said to me as I waited for him just inside the glass doors. Ice dams? I had no idea what he meant. But then he explained how the roof had been pitched too low years ago when the addition had been done, and because of that low pitch the water moved off too slowly, sometimes refreezing right at the edge of the roof line. This refreezing would cause a back up when more snow and melt and refreezing happened, etc, etc. So, essentially our roof had been pooling up for weeks with the early snow we had been getting. Who knew?
We have mentioned those ice dams here and there whenever we get snow. A few times over this Christmas break Geo has made the familiar climb to the roof to scrape it off so that the dams can't even get started. There is real wisdom to preventative action. We know they might return and we do everything we can to stop them.
There is always some kind of ice dam rearing its cold and nasty head, but my goal is chip it away before the pooling does more damage than it needs to. There's my metaphor. brrrrrr
