Wetness protection

Did the title intrigue you? :) I am attempting to get caught up on some blog posts I have been meaning to write. I mentioned in a previous post (quite a while ago actually) that we suffered some storm damage from Hurricane Sandy. The damage was pretty minor, just a leak at our roofline, but we decided to get it investigated. We actually thought that our roof was starting to fail us. We were under the assumption that the roof was as old as the house, which would make it about 27 years old. We had a local roofer come out to take a look. He climbed in our attic and then actually walked on our roof. He came to the conclusion that there was no way our roof was original to the house. But the plywood underneath showed no signs of a previous roof (which caused our home inspector to believe it was original). The roofer suspected that our home was one of the homes that fell under the fire retardent plywood lawsuit that affected homes, especially townhomes, built in the 1980s. I ended up emailing our HOA and did confirm that his suspicions were indeed true. Our roof was replaced at some point in the 1990s and the roofer thought it was about 15 years old. Not bad. So why was it leaking? Well, it turns out that not all of the flashing was replaced when they put in the new roof. The flashing around the chimney needed to be replaced.

Here is a picture of the original flashing (the copper stuff around the chimney).

This is just a picture of our roof. Isn't it pretty?

More flashing (up close).

I'm pretty sure every house in our neighborhood had satellite TV at one point. The antennas are pretty prolific in our neighborhood.

Here you can really see how leaks might be happening.

The back side of the chimney.

And here is the result after the new flashing was put in. The roofers also had to remove and replace the shingles around the area. But the really great thing is we went from thinking we would have to spend thousands of dollars for a new roof to spending a couple hundred on new flashing. And no more leaks!