Many, many hours of heavy downpours yesterday and last night…the radar summary indicates 2.5-3.5 inches…but I’m betting it was much more than that. There’s 9″ of rain in my impromptu rain gauge at the Old Vic (a 5 gallon bucket in the back yard).
Apparently, I have a “thing” for towers.
The roof is somewhat flat, with a pitch to the back…and the back wall of the building stands proud of the roof. They didn’t want it to run off freely…the water has to escape through a couple scuppers and down the downspouts. There’s not much to do about it barring structural changes to the building. Additional problems come from city rules about drainage water…some archaic and pointless…but perhaps made sense once with the dirt streets and such prevalent when this building was built. As an example, drain water from a roof cannot run across the sidewalk.
The result of all this is…the scuppers and drains aren’t big enough for extremely heavy downpours.
As early as 10:30am yesterday morning water was piling up on the roof of The Cupola building multiple inches deep and finding every spot it possibly could get through to leak. Additionally, if it does pile up that deep, a lot of weight is added to the roof…flexing things and insuring any weak seam ect gets opened up.
We have containers/etc upstairs to try to contain this…but the very long duration of the heavy downpours pretty much insures I’ve got a mess over there.
I’m sucking down my coffee…trying to work myself up to heading over and dealing with whatever I need to deal with.
I’ve some ideas for changes to eliminate this 145(ish) year old problem…but now is not the time for a number of reasons.
As for the Old Vic itself? It’s roof is mostly in good repair. There is one section that is not…and I’ve actually scheduled that to be replaced (yeah repair budget!)…but that’s the weird thing about the place…in all that rain yesterday it never leaked. I guess the wind has to be just right or something.
Ah well. Off to the races.
Update: 10/30:
I went and did the unthinkable…I talked to a pro…as in…somebody that knows what he’s doing with this particular kind of surface…
VERY unlike me, I know…
Got the scoop on what to use on the roof…what HE would do if he was doing…and warranting the work…and even more importantly…a roofing supply place here in Dallas that is quite a bit cheaper than I can get the stuff elsewhere…
I had a plan…but wanted to verify it. It’s too much work and too much money to waste. It’s time to quit patching and do it right.
I wasn’t off by much…my plan was good…but the pro had better materials in mind.
Sooo…we’ve scheduled a bit of work on The Cupola building this weekend…
The plan:
Put all this stuff…
A truck full of work
On there…
The roof of The Cupola Building…looking east.
Essentially, sweep roof. Spread particular kind of goop. Put polyester fabric down (40″ x 300′ roll, overlap 4″ so basically 3′ wide strips), let dry some, spread goop on top of fabric. Come back after 30 days and coat with an aluminum/reflective coating.
This is enough for most of what I want to do…and certainly enough to occupy us for this weekend…so after this application, I’ll come back and get the rest of the materials.
Ugh…gonna get my exercise this weekend…
Update 11/1
Just horked (technical term) a 1000 pounds of stuff to the second floor of our building. Up these stairs…which are about 14 feet up, then a landing, turn right and up another 5 feet.
It’s a good thing I’m all fat and out of shape or this stuff would be hard…
Up 14 feet, turn right, up another 5. Ugh. 1000 pounds of stuff I just hauled up these things…
CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer
