The Back Story on the Remodeling

The kitchen ceiling had been leaking since we moved into this house. Drip, drip, drip on my head as I did the dishes. Talk about adding insult to injury. My BelovedEngineer kept insisting that the roof didn't leak, that the problem was the gutters had leaves in them. Last winter bits of plaster started falling. I left them on the floor so he would be sure to notice that it was more than raindrops falling on my head. When it looked like this,


he finally admitted that, perhaps, the roof was leaking.

We live in Utah. True, it doesn't rain much in the summer, but it sure as heck snows in the winter. We decided to tear off the old flat roof and put on a pitched roof. We would vault the living room ceiling while we were at it and update and modernize our 50-year-old house.

We started in July, thinking we would be finished by the end of September.

HA!

This is what happened the first of August...


When we had no roof but plastic, there came a mighty rain storm. A true frog strangler. A microburst preceded it. The wind didn't blow the plastic off, it shattered it, blasting shards of plastic all over the neighborhood.

The rain came in like a waterfall for three hours. Great chunks of the ceiling fell with thundering crashes. The basement flooded as the water ran down the interior walls. And of course my Beloved was out of town that week. His timing is always immaculate.

As a result, we have been remodeling the whole house. The roof and the first floor are mostly done now. Next week we will begin on the basement.