The house has a roof top patio at the top of the stairs to the third floor. If you turn left you go into the master suite and right takes you out a door onto the patio. This sounds like a nice idea. Cocktails on the roof in the evening. Dining al fresco. Container garden. It’s even plumbed for and built to support a hot tub in theory. The reality is that it’s a flat roof with a tile floor that gets insanely hot in the long Texas summers and it’s a hassle to drag anything up there to eat or drink because it’s up two flights of stairs. So basically wasted space. But wait! The bonus is that flat roofs are notorious for failing, leaking and needing repairs. In the case of this one, there is also no eave or overhang so, without a gutter on the end, water runs off and straight down the back of the house. A well operating gutter is fundamental to the integrity of the house. Especially since more than half of the master suite roof drains right onto that patio causing it to catch more than twice the water it would otherwise.
I didn’t really grasp this issue in its fullness. Occasionally the gutter would back up with leaves and overflow. I’d go out with a broom handle and push stuff around until it was flowing again. We had a little water get in every once in a blue moon because of that. There were little chunks of thinset in the gutter sometimes which were flaking off of the underside of the tiles. There was some staining on the trim on the back of the house where the gutter seam was leaking. No big deal. A fix for the future. And then, in February of 2021 we had Winter Storm Uri.
Central Texas really doesn’t get weather like this. People were calling it a 100 year storm though, given the whole climate change thing I think that’s a bit optimistic. We had a lot of ice and snow build up on the house, especially on the patio. When the snow started to melt it came in over the attic door threshold on the far side of the patio and leaked in the ceiling of the little loft space in the house. I spent a half hour shoveling snow and ice off the patio to stop that.
It also accumulated in the gutter and really accelerated its collapse. The north side wouldn’t drain to the downspout at all anymore, leaking out of the wall-side corner seam and onto the second floor window trim below it. The center seam also leaked badly and was doing the same to the big windows in the center of the back wall of the house.
After a fairly wet spring, water started coming in that second floor window below the gutter corner pretty badly and the drywall there became increasingly stained and damaged. I decided to have someone come replace the gutter. And I figured while I was at it I would have them add gutters for the master suite roof and for the front of the house to help with potential damage from those sources also. I started working on that June 1st.
After a few visits I selected a company and signed a contract on July 15th. However, that contract specified that the fascia and drip edge off the back of the patio was badly damaged and had to be repaired before the gutter installation or the work would not be warranted. So now the question is, is a roof-top patio a roof or a floor? Something else? The roofing company I’d used previously, who had been subsequently acquired by a big national chain, said it wasn’t a roof but if I wanted them to do some other roof work just let them know.
The gutter company suggested I contact a home and commercial general purpose / handyman company which I did. They originally said it would be two days work to replace the fascia, drip edge and first row of tile and substrate. Then later increased that to three days. At this point it is the end of July and the work is scheduled for mid September. When the handyman arrived he looked at the work and said it was a bigger project than three days of him working and that I needed to have their estimator come out, look at it and bid a full project. So I scheduled that, and in the mean time contacted a local design/build firm to give me a second opinion. I also pocket dialed my realtor on my birthday and ended up talking to him about the problem and he put me in touch with the guy he uses for this kind of work.
The first handyman company took a long time to get a proposal to me and ended up not being what I wanted so I went with my realtor’s contractor. I signed off on that work the second week of October, which included complete replacement of the patio tile, the drip edge and some of the rotted trim, plus replacing the bad drywall in the window and the ceiling where the water had leaked into the loft.
Work on the patio replacement finally started the second week of November and finished in a week. It’s ok. Several of the tiles aren’t laid perfectly flat and even but it appears to be water tight which was the important thing.
Next the construction crew came and started repairing the trim at which point they found that the OSB sheathing underneath was also rotten.
Change Order #1 was approved to remove the trim, siding and sheathing under the north gutter corner and replace them. That work was completed and the new drip edge was added and the old gutter removed. That drip edge is installed differently. It’s not under the tile substrate but rather over the edge of the tile and caulked down. We’ll see how that does in the long run.
At this point it was Thanksgiving and the crew was off, there was no longer any gutter on the edge of the patio and then it rained. The rain ran off the side of the patio and down the back of the house and started coming in all of the windows and the sliding door. I spent all day changing towels and catching water.
Change Order #2 was approved to replace the trim, siding and sheathing for the rest of the wall under the patio. This took another week or so. With the outside finished, I finally got the gutter installation scheduled.
The gutters were installed on December 14th, six and a half months after I first started calling gutter companies. This is a theme with this year.
However we’re not done yet. We’re staying in an Airbnb this week because the interior work is being done on the house. This is right in the middle of the biggest Covid surge of the pandemic: the Omicron variant. We’d probably have to be out of the house anyway. It was not adequately explained to me how inhospitable the house would be this week. We’d planned to go home to sleep, being away during the day only. However, the first and second floors are covered in plastic and paper drops cloths and all of the furniture is pushed up against the walls rendering the space useless to a toddler. The bedrooms are fine but that doesn’t make for much of a living arrangement. And it’s just as well we’re out because apparently the aerosol Covid can linger for hours, especially if the air isn’t being filtered or exchanged.
It froze again last night, though not badly, 29F. The main house HVAC is off because it sucks the plastic up against the returns when it runs which is bad for the equipment and dangerous with a gas furnace. It would be a real shame to burn the house down as we’re finishing this project. That means it was 59F in the house this morning. My contractor called to tell me they’d need another day. The ceiling texture didn’t finish drying overnight, presumably because of the cold and lack of the drying effect of central heat.
So one extra day trapped in the temporary house until we can go back to the one we’ve been trapped in for two years. Every time I turn around this project costs more. More dollars, more sanity, more risk to health and safety. The extra night rental is a drop in the bucket, literally less than 1% of the total cost but I’m exhausted with the whole process and I really want it to finally be over.