Because this autumn wasn’t already exciting enough, fates connived to cause our roof to start leaking last month. We got by with a temporary patch job and a fleet of buckets in the attic, but the fall rains got the best of us, and I feared a completely meltdown come midwinter or spring thaw.
Fortunately, by some miracle of scheduling and logistics, MacBeth Bros. were able to squeeze in our job last week. Their crew is dynamite: they threaded the needle of roofing through the rain and snow and sleet and they got it done: the front roof went up on Tuesday, the back roof on Thursday, and the vestibules on Friday.
We’ve got more infrastructure work ahead of us this fall, as the roof worked showed up some issues with our chimney, and we have a longstanding job to insulate the attic that we really need to attend to. But we’ve made a good start.
The aforementioned fates, seeing that we’d taken control of things, decided to up the ante and caused our upstairs toilet to leak, which damaged our kitchen ceiling; fortunately this was covered by our PEI Mutual insurance policy, so this work was quickly attended to and the paint went up on the kitchen ceiling on Friday.
In the grander scheme of things we have nothing to complain about: we can afford to pay the bills, we have food on our plates and hot water in our radiators, and we’re ready to take on the winter.
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We had a home energy audit done this fall and I was amazed at how good the rebates were for things like your attic insulation project (no, I am not a spam bot, I just talk like one when the topic of government rebates comes up!). Our house is only 16 years old and we need a lot more insulation in our attic, too. efficiencyPEI have all the info.
Curious as to how long it has been since your last roof. The ones who install your roof can make a great deal of difference, as I learned the hard way. Hopefully you used shingles that tar themselves together, so next spring they will become a wind proof roof. Good luck!
We purchased our house in 2000 and had a new roof put on that summer.
In 2001, just a few months later, we had some severe ice damming and water infiltration into the upper floor of the house and the response to that, and to similar (although less severe) ice dams in 2015 likely didn’t help with the roof’s longevity. Nor did my raking the roof after every snow for the past 5 years, also an effort to try to prevent ice dams.
This time around we had MacBeth Bros. put an ice and water shield on the lower parts of the roof and 6 feet up the eaves.
We’re hopeful that, between this and our plans to address attic insulation ASAP, we’ll have a dry house for a long time on.