The Realities of owning a Historic Home

In addition to cleaning up the orchard and preparing for Christmas we've been doing a little house work lately.

We bought this old girl knowing there would be work ahead of us.  Not to say she's in bad condition as there many good things about her.  Considering some of the old farm houses we had seen, this house was in great condition.  But her maintenance had faltered prior to our purchase and we took her over with stars in our eyes thinking we would have her ship shape in no time.

So pretty but hiding so many problems

It started off well, we installed a new furnace, a hot water tank and did a major bathroom renovation.  But two years has passed quickly and there's still so much to do.  Some of those renovations cannot wait anymore.  A few weeks ago I ran upstairs to fetch something and heard an odd sound.  Looking around I realized it was coming from the doorframe of the guest bedroom.  Water was dripping between the wood panels onto the carpet below.  How can a door frame spring a leak?

oh wait, it wasn't the door frame, it was the roof.  In the attic above the door frame.

We had previously discussed putting a new roof on the house but the amount of money had us stalling.  Obviously it can't wait any longer.  So we started discussing our options and considering our finances.  Not for too long though as the old girl reminded us, not so gently, that a roof was absolutely necessary, as soon as possible.  This time I heard a noise coming from the living room and sure enough, drip drip drip, through the dry wall and onto the carpet.  A second leak.  Time to take immediate action.

So despite a fear of heights it was decided hubby would go up on the roof with a bucket of tar and temporarily fix the impending disaster.  We've discovered home ownership means a lot of things, one of those is a fear of heights must be pushed aside.  There are greater issues here.

Emergency roof repair goo

The second leak turned out to be easily repaired.  It's a small side roof on the back of the house that juts out just a couple feet.  Luckily it's not far off the ground and easily reached by ladder.  An hour of painting and the problem was solved.  No more leak.

Luckily we've had good weather this fall so it was
easy to find a nice day to do this work

That first leak though proved to be much more difficult.

The leak is SOMEWHERE up there!

This time the fear of heights won out.  Getting up on that roof was downright dangerous.  What were we to do?  We were pretty sure we knew where the crack was but had no way to reach it, unless, that is, you have a very long pole.

We took some long boards and nailed a bucket to the end.  Filled the bucket with tar and pushed it far up to the peak.  Some twisting and turning and the bucket was tipped releasing the tar which rolled slowly down the roof covering the shingles.

Now, if anyone is thinking this is a brilliant idea you might want to reconsider.  Things were going well until the bucket came loose off it's nail and barreled down the roof sending tar flying in all directions.  Hubby was covered literally from his head to his feet in tar.  I was holding the ladder and found I couldn't let go as both my hands and the ladder were now covered in tar.  Even the cat managed to step into a puddle of tar coating his foot.

Have you ever tried to clean tar off a cat?  Difficult is an understatement.

His ears are back for a reason

Tar is nasty smelly toxic stuff and I could see that the cat was going to try licking it off his foot so there was no choice but to pin him down and use a different toxic chemical to remove it.  Ironically the cat was completely okay with this process, that is, until we removed all the tar and then had to use soap and water to then remove the toxic alcohol from his foot.  Why in the world are cats so cranky when it comes to water?  At one point the cat was attached to my head and Jody kept telling me to let go.  Let go?  I wasn't even holding on!  In fact the cat was embedded so deeply into my skull that I was worried I might have to wear him in to work the next day as a hat.

The good news is that hair, hat, hands, carpet and pets have now all been de-tarred.  The bad news, after two tries we still weren't able to find and tar the exact spot of that first leak.  So for now we're living with buckets in the attic and hoping for freezing weather so we won't have to worry about dripping.  I can't believe I'm actually wishing for colder weather!