Oh, No! Don't Let the Rain Come Down

We have had a water leak in the bathroom since before we moved here. Pat had tried patching it but couldn't find the source of the leak. I know Dad fought leaks in the utility room and bathroom for years because that section of the house has a flat roof. Could the source of the leak be at the joint to the sloped roof? Pat didn't think so, but it had happened before.

When one last temporary measure didn't work, Pat had had enough. He would remove the entire section of roof. Let the leak escape him then!

Mike, our neighbor, came over and he and Pat started stripping shingles off the roof. Pat still isn't sure why some of the things he found were there. The first two layers were asphalt shingles. Then there were two layers of what appeared to be tar paper, but turned out to be sheets of heavy black plastic, maybe a plastic tarpaulin. Under that was the strangest part of all: He found a layer of felt paper, sand, another layer of felt paper, more sand, and then the original wood. He said he first thought the sand and felt paper were rotted wood, but later inspection showed it to be sand and felt. Now, the question is WHY sand and felt??

The black plastic may have been something Dad did to fix that leak at the joint between two roof lines, but the other stuff was before we lived here. WHY sand and felt?? We have no clue.

It turned out the leak was caused by a satellite microwave dish my son Joe had mounted on the roof when he lived here. There was a small leak while the dish was in place, but it REALLY started to be serious after Pat removed the dish. He thought he had patched the screw holes at the time, but there was a bigger problem underneath that he didn't know about.

I'm so glad it's fixed now. Come Spring Pat is going to replace the main roof. That will be a job. There are seven layers there -- going back to the original wood shingles.