Yet another of our examples of the obvious. A year and a half ago, I re-shingled our porch roof, which had been leaking badly. As part of that project, I adjusted the gutter to slope towards the downspout, thinking that maybe, just maybe, it’d be better to have the water head in that direction instead of just pooling up in the front and constantly spilling over the lip. While that was likely an admirable idea, it turned out that the downspout had been installed too high on the side of the house, so I wasn’t able to reattach the connecting piece, as it would have only worked if water somehow started flowing up instead of down. And like so many house projects, once the major part is done, it’s oh so easy to let the little stuff fall into the “I’ll get the parts and fix it next weekend” trap.
Fast forward to a year later, and we gradually began to notice cracking on our porch floor. At first I thought it was my imagination, but eventually it became obvious that the crack was growing. After a bunch of head-scratching, I figured out that the right side of the porch (near the aforementioned gutter) had sunk about 1/2″. While that might not sound like much, apparently it was too much for our megalithic concrete porch, so something had to give. And unfortunately, that something was the top deck of the porch, right in front of the door. Seeing the damage and seeking to head off any additional expense to our future repairs, I sprung into action and “solved” the problem by propping up a board with some bricks to force the water to drain away from the porch. But don’t worry, we’ll do the permanent fix next weekend…
