Our house will turn 200 years old next year. It was built in 1827 for the family of Henry Smith, by Henry and his brother Isaac. Isaac went on to design and build several other less modest buildings in Charlottetown, including our neighbouring Province House.
Province House just opened after a decade-long $100 million+ restoration, the root of which, when you get right down to it, was 180 years of water infiltration.
Our friend Brian Willis managed the restoration project for Public Works, and he gave an excellent talk the afternoon of Province House’s reopening last month, a talk that demonstrated his depth of knowledge about leaky old houses built by the Smith brothers.
Our house, alas, is also a leaky Smith brothers house.
The first time this came to a head was in the winter of 2001 when this:
Led to this:
Ice dams on the back of the house led to significant water infiltration, which required that we leave the house, with 4 month old Olivia, for almost a month, while the damage was remediated.
The remediation handled the restoration of the inside of the house, but not the fundamental infiltration issues, issues that, for the most part, I have been at least theoretically able to keep at bay by religious raking of the back roof after every snowfall, especially during the freeze-thaw ice dam periods of February and March.
Theoretically.
Things came to a head again in the fall of 2018 when the front roof started leaking, requiring me to maintain a network of buckets in the attic every night and, ultimately, a rush late-season roof job.
This past winter, alas, we started to get leaking through the window well in the back upstairs bath, and, this fall, into the window well of the kitchen below it.
I’ve been kicking this can ahead too many times to have not jumping back into it somewhat traumatic. Lisa, bless her heart, heeded my “can you move this forward and take the bull by the horns?” request.
Lisa’s brilliant first move: ask Brian, given his expertise in the “leaky Smith houses” field. He generously agreed to drop over after work a few weeks ago to take a look at our house with an eye to helping us understand how we can improve our situation.
Brian is, it became obvious, a patient and clear explainer—we knew that from his Province House talk, and it was even more impactful when his topic was our house. It turns out that some of what ailed Province House, in very general terms, is what ails our house, and so a plan has emerged for keeping the water out: sealing, insulating, venting are at the heart of it.
This week Ben Thompson and his crew from the (excellently-named) Bent Carpentry arrived to start the we-hope-it-comes-in-at-less-than-$100 million remediation job. Walls have been peeled away, ceilings opening up, the attic probed, ancestral tiny leaks spotted, a starling’s nest found in the exhaust vent from the exhaust fan.
Our main bathroom is mostly out of commission during this work, something we’ll work around for the promise of a house that keeps the water out. Stay tuned.
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