Rain takes on a whole new dimension when you live in an 80 year-old house with a bad roof and a foundation that looks like it would wash away if it gets too wet.
Add to that the fact that there are indoor electric outlets mounted on the outside of the house and you will understand why this recent rain storm caused a bit of anxiety.
The rain started about midnight. This was the first rain L.A. had seen in months, certainly the first since we moved into our new-old house just weeks ago. The roof is 25+ year-old asphalt shingles nailed over the original ancient wood shake. The termites have continued to eat the wood shake out from underneath the asphalt, creating little wrinkles and pockets in the shingles. The roof’s appearance is not reassuring but the good news is that it did not leak, this time.
Carrie’s Office roof isn’t made of individual shingles, but of the asphalt on a roll that most people call tarpaper. Overall, the roof looks flat and tight with the exception of one joint near an eave where the roofing has split and curled creating a ragged fringe along about three feet of the roof edge. Perhaps we were just lucky, or it didn’t rain long or hard enough (we did get nearly an inch in 24 hours), but even this spot stayed dry.
When we repainted the Studio, we covered a lot of water stain on the ceiling and walls that we hoped was old damage. It appears that when the structure was first built, the high point of the single pitch roof wasn’t properly sealed and water came in under the eave. A short second pitch was added to give the roof a peak. We were hoping this had cured the leaks but had to wait until this rainfall to find out that we were right. As much effort as Carrie has put into remodeling the Studio, we are very happy that this storm didn’t deal us a setback.
The stone foundation of the main house was another source of anxiety during the wet weekend. The foundation is nothing more than stones piled up and mortared together with a house sitting on top. In addition to the California earthquake concerns that the foundation could crumble and or the house could simply slide off the stones if shaken too hard, the mortar holding the stones together is turning to powder and washes away quite easily. The last thing you want is water pooling against the foundation. It is important that the roof be properly guttered, and the ground around the foundation be properly sloped, to carry water away from the foundation. This means, of course, that our house has no gutters, and the slope encourages the foundation-dissolving rainwater to run toward the house.
So there we were with umbrella in one hand and a hoe in the other (Okay that was Carrie. I had a shovel and wasn’t issued an umbrella.), standing in the early morning downpour, creating little riverbeds and rivulets to coax the water away from the house.
Adding gutters and a drainage ditch, replacing the mortar between the foundation stones, and grading the slope make up the permanent solution, but in the meantime, expect to see us performing our hoe and shovel based water management duties the next time it rains.
About that indoor electric outlet that is hanging by its wires on the back wall? That is just one of the 800 things on our to-do list. The electrical wiring in the house is an amateurish and scary amalgam of original 1920’s knob and post, late 50’s two-wire polarized outlets, and some grounded (perhaps) Romex-fed outlets in two rooms. My point is that one wet outlet hanging on the back wall is not at the top of the list of things keeping us awake. One big arcing buzzing short circuit may move it up though.
