I don’t have any photos or exciting updates lately, although that doesn’t mean that nothing has been going on with the house …
So way back in the day, we discovered mold in our 3rd floor bedroom. And then shortly thereafter, we discovered that it was not, in fact, mold. It was efflorescence. Which seems like a win, until you piece together the obvious conclusion — this means water infiltration.
We had several contractors come through to take a look at it — at least one roofer and two masons. And the responses we got back said, generally speaking — there’s nothing wrong with the masonry, and our roof probably isn’t leaking.
But we noticed the efflorescence popping up on the bottom floor of the house, directly underneath the probably-not-leaking-but-must-be-leaking spot on the third floor. And decided it was finally time to address the issue (it only took us a year to get around to it … not bad. I’ll give myself a pat on the back for this one).
To take care of this work, we (fortunately) found a great mason. After checking out a few contractors, we settled on one we trusted, was straightforward with us, and (hallelujah!) was honest about what parts we could DIY / address ourselves to save money (such as patching the hole in the 3rd floor bedroom, a job that most others wanted to do for us, and charge us for). His name is Kyle and his company is LB Masonry, in case you’re in the market for masonry in the greater Philadelphia area.
The good news was that, on the whole, the brickwork on our house was in great condition (especially great as it’s 112 years old). According to Kyle’s survey, there were a few places that needed to be re-pointed, and the chimney on the probably-actually-leaking side of the house needed to have the flashing correctly installed. So that’s what we contracted for.
But of course things don’t always go according to plan.
The bad news is what he found while up there: first, the roof on the front side of the house is at it’s need-to-be-replaced stage. There was also a section above one of the dormers that was just flat-out missing some shingles. I want to believe that this was a result of the recent hurricane that hit the East Coast, but I suspect that it’s been an issue for longer, given obvious signs of water infiltration on the inside of the house. Which aggravates me because we’ve had others up on the roof recently, and they just apparently didn’t notice the issue. And I would like to take a moment to point something out — the back half of our house has a slate roof which is original to the house (i.e. 112 years old). The front side has an asphalt shingle roof that is maybe a decade or two old. One of those sides needs to be replaced, and I’ll give you a hint — it’s not the 112-year-old side. So if you have an awesome slate roof, do the right thing and replace the one or two broken pieces each year (for only ~$100) instead of letting it get bad and then tearing it all out to put asphalt in. It makes me sad that someone did that to our house.
The second bit of bad news regards the chimney. We have two chimneys; one is used to vent our oil furnace (as well as the attached house’s furnace), the other is, as far as we could tell, not being used. We’ve been eyeing it for the installation of a wood stove. But those hopes were dashed when Kyle came down (with photos, which I appreciate, ’cause I am not ready to climb up on my own roof) to tell me that some idiot (er… former occupant) poured concrete in the chimney. Yes. Concrete. Into the chimney. For no discernible reason (if you just wanted to seal it off, it is both cheaper and more effective to just put a steel plate on top). There’s no way to know if the whole chimney is filled or if the concrete is only a few inches/feet thick without tearing it to pieces (since we don’t have any fireplaces to poke around in). No matter what, to reverse it would cost big bucks, and would require the complete removal and re-installation of the chimney. Which doesn’t really fit into my master plan or budget. But beyond the irreversibility of this “fix”, it also made a nice little swimming pool in my roof — water just collected there and sat on top of the concrete, eventually absorbing through the brickwork. Ah — I think we finally found the actual source of the water infiltration in my probably-not-leaking roof (I guess we could honestly say that the roof was not technically leaking, because it was actually the chimney-turned-cistern). To fix this, we (or actually Kyle and his partner) sealed off the chimney with a metal plate, just like the concrete-wielding former owner should have done to begin with.
So while I’m still clearly steaming a little bit about the chimney situation (but seriously – what kind of jackass would do that? it makes no sense!), I am happy to report that we’re leak-free. Which means we can start patching up the various cracks and holes caused by water damage and our mold-hunting-escapade.
{ kelley + alex } 