Roof Repair

Last week I was blowing leaves and twigs off the cabin roof when I noticed a decidedly spongy spot in the plywood decking. This was no surprise. In steady rains the cabin has leaked in that general area (fortunately in the entry to the great room) for much of the past decade. On numerous occasions I had climbed around on the roof, inspecting everything imaginable and searching for the mysterious source of the leak. I could never find it.

So the good news was that the source of the leak could now be pinned down to above and slightly upslope of the spongy decking. I made a trip to town for a couple of packs of shingles and this week I set about the repair. For starters I had to remove all the shingles above the rotten section until I worked my way out to sound wood on all sides. This is trickier than removing an old roof prior to a general reshingling because one must be vigilant not to poke holes in the surrounding shingles. In the best case I would have had to patch only a small section of plywood--perhaps 3 feet by 3 feet--but as it happened, I ended up with about 8 feet by 8 feet ripped away as shown in the picture below.

Of course, this didn't line up perfectly with the support beams beneath, nor was the exposed area perfectly square. And not much to my surprise, a couple of the support beams themselves were past saving. After a couple of afternoons of work, I had created a pretty respectable hole in my roof.

Following another trip to town for a roll of 30 lb felt, I began creating a grid of new beams for the patch. Then I pieced in plywood decking (which was free because I had salvaged it from last winter's siding repairs on the Jonesboro house). I discovered it was a tricky job to slide in roofing felt so that the retained shingles properly overlaid the felt. Then it was just a matter of nailing on the new shingles--a job that inevitably involves a good bit of sanding of one's kneecaps and knuckles on the coarse surface of the shingles.

So now I have a nicely patched roof. The original cause of all the trouble was a single roofing nail that had gradually worked its way loose and incrementally poked a well-concealed hole in the shingles above it. I know that I've eliminated that particular source of leakage, but I won't find out whether the new patch is successful at shedding water until we get a long, soaking rainstorm. But I do know that even if one starts a roof repair in the midst of one of the longest droughts in years--and the forecast shows no rain in the days to come--you can be guaranteed at least some precipitation as soon as you cut a big hole in your roof. For two mornings Sue and I made use of every bucket and pan in the house to capture what we could of unpredicted fall drizzles.