15 thoughts on “California Rain”

  1. Rand, what style of roof (EPDM rubber, asphalt shingle, ceramic tile, etc.)? They each have a “tech” for leak finding and repair.

    1. That section of the roof is tile. I’m guessing it’s leaking at the edge (it’s tile inside of an exterior stucco wall) and down into the wall below. I haven’t seen any problems on the upper floor, though.

  2. This is after-the fact, but if you have plaster or gypsum wallboard walls and ceilings, I recommend blotting the affected areas with fresh, undiluted bleach. This prevents mold growth from starting and even stops it if it has started as indicated by that moldy-basement smell.

    The only other advice is when you do that, after the habits of the Apollo astronauts taking toilet breaks with their primitive gear, “get naked” when you apply the bleach. I have gotten spousal scoldings for wrecking shirts with bleach drips. The shirt (or pants — I suggested to “get naked”) really isn’t wrecked, but it has this batik-effect that your spouse won’t let you wear that shirt to work anymore.

  3. I was at a Rocket Test Group meeting at China Lake yesterday, and it was the soggiest site visit I’ve been on in almost ten years of RTG meetings. In the desert, of course.

    1. In the BIG El Niño winter of 1997-1998, I was spending a good chunk of time at Edwards. The lakebeds flooded of course (and didn’t become usable until the following December), but there was also much flooding elsewhere in the Antelope Valley; you’d be driving along and suddenly an almost-forgotten wash was flowing rapidly across the road, sometimes driveable, often not. Somehow I seemed to get tagged with all the driving on those trips too… 🙂

  4. If you don’t see evidence that there’s an issue on upper floors, make sure that it’s not a plumbing leak before sinking too much into fixing the roof. My brother had a similar issue in a house he bought, and what looked like a leak from a roof/wall interface turned out to be a supply line leak (but not frost-related).

    When they fixed his roof, they found things that needed fixing, but they weren’t urgent, and he wished he had still had some of that money when it came time to tear walls out and replace them for the plumbing problem.

    1. There’s no plumbing in that area. The supply lines are (frighteningly) in the slab. I say frighteningly because the front house is identical to ours, and he developed a leak in them. He ended up abandoning and running new ones through the walls.

        1. Well, it was built over 35 years ago, not that it’s an excuse. Honestly, it would never have occurred to me that they’d do something so insane, until my front neighbor’s developed a hot-water leak, and we could feel it through the floor.

  5. I don’t see any reason to spend your time fixing the leaks and repairing the damage when it could be better spent trying to build grass-roots political support to stop man-made global climate change, thus protecting every leaky house on the planet from these disastrous weather extremes. Besides, what’s the point of maintaining infrastructure if it warms up by a degree and we all die?
    [/sarc]

  6. Rand, I had a similar (no sign of it upstairs, only downstairs) leak issue in a past house. It’d only do it when both raining and windy, which was the clue I needed to find it. It was a went in the wall, not the roof. (fixing it took 10 minutes and a tube of sealant.) It’s worth looking into if this might be a possible cause.

    As for the popcorn ceiling, I have that too; I put it in my new house because I like the acoustic properties. But, staining is an issue (a sink overflow gave me water stains). I fixed it by taking a small unstained piece for a color match for stain (not paint!) and used that (applied with a sprayer) to recolor it and hide the water stain. It took a little feathering, but it worked. (I’d have just done the whole room if it had been in an area that wasn’t huge).

    Best of luck.

  7. There is plumbing that goes through the roof. Every sewer line from a kitchen or bathroom has to have a kind of chimney to vent it so gas doesn’t build up and explode. Mine are these small diameter stove pipes on the roof. Wherever something intersects the roof, there is the potential for leaks.

Comments are closed.