Final Roof Repairs

Okay, this blog has been gathering cobwebs while its blogger has been AWOL. I’ve just had my niece Samantha and her boyfriend Dean staying here for three weeks, but I can’t blame them for the lack of posts here. Nuts as they are.

 

Anyway, what’s been happening? Well. A month or so back local builder Mikalis got round to sorting out the final leaking part of my roof.

 

The roof consists of three concrete slabs at different levels. The steps between these were over two-foot thick internal stone walls, but the slabs had not been overlapped or joined in any way. They expanded and contracted independently creating cracks and then interesting water features inside the house when it rained. Mikalis’s answer to this was to rip out the accumulation of crappy repairs, expose the steel in each roof, bind it together with an earthquake cage, put specialised sealants down the sides and re-concrete the whole thing.

 

Of course, once he started ripping things up he soon exposed other work that needed doing. This particular roof was slanted so it drained onto a neighbour’s roof which, besides not being very neighbourly, was probably illegal. The tiling was also crap – the tiles up high on blobs of tile cement so water could get underneath them through the slightest crack or hole, which it had done. I told him to rip up all the tiles and redo the lot.

 

Mikalis had to spread a layer of concrete across the roof to change the slant, and make a hole in the wall to take a drainpipe. After all the concrete had set he painted it with another sealant, then laid new tiles. The final result doesn’t look much different from how it was before, but hopefully next year I won’t come back to see where water has been running down or soaking into the wall underneath.