leak

With many DIY projects, I know just enough to have an unjustified confidence and not enough to know that I’m screwing something up.  I had started installing the playhouse shingles based on my own recollections of how much exposure each shingle was supposed to get.  You have to keep in mind that I’ve never installed a cedar roof before, so these memories might have been based on something I read years ago.  Long enough ago that I had forgotten the important parts.

When I was about 1/3 of the way through the roof, I noticed that the back of the tag had some instructions that just had to be wrong, since they didn’t agree with what I was doing.  They said that each shingle should get no more than 5″ of exposure, but I was setting them with 7 1/2″.  Given that they are about 15-16″ long, that meant the difference between 2 layers and 3 layers.  Since I was careful about my seams and nail spacing, I convinced myself that it just wasn’t necessary to go so overkill on a playhouse.   And besides, who wants to spend more on cedar shingles than they absolutely have to?  The partial roof had already gone through several rains without incident, so I wasn’t too concerned.

Well after getting much more of the roof done today and checking on it after a rain, I now realize I screwed up.  While there are no active leaks, the problem is actually water soaking through the shingles, causing a bunch of them to look like the picture below.  I think this will eventually lead to real leaks, so my plan now is to start pulling up nails and resetting shingles at the correct 5″ spacing.  Not fun all all, but better to do it now than rip it apart or replace it later!

Soaked cedar

We woke up in the middle of the night to what we thought was our daughter running the bathroom faucets at full blast. When I went around the corner to tell her to turn them down, I noticed two things. First, she was not in the bathroom, and even more worrisome, the water was coming from below the sink, not above it! It was spraying gushers out of one of the supply valves. After turning off the valve and mopping up the mess, I was left wondering how this could have happened. Any time I’ve seen a washer or seal give way, it always starts with a few drops or a trickle. This one went from perfectly normal to fire hose in a single step. Because our daughter had a bad cold and had woken us up about a dozen times during the night, I was tired enough to put it out of my mind and just go back to sleep. While I recognized and appreciated the fact that we had narrowly avoided a disaster (what if it had been during the day or while we were on vacation?), that wasn’t enough to keep me awake. Click to continue »