This is What Happens...

... when I leave Chris and JR home alone.

I come home to a pile of debris in the front yard and an enthusiastic, "Honey, we figured out where the front porch is leaking!" Apparently they were bored when I was at a party one night, and decided to get out on the roof and do some poking around. They pulled up some cracked, bubbled tar where we suspected the leak was originating and under it found layers of rolled shingle and some very wet plywood. So rather than simply putting another coat of tar on the roof like we had planned, they decided to pull up that entire area first and "fix" it.

So they went shopping, got everything they needed (well, not quite, multiple trips were made...), and went to work. They put new plywood in the hole to raise it up, caulked all the way around, covered it with tin, and spent lots of time (and many tubes of caulk) covering every seam and nail hole to make sure it was water-tight.

When everything was caulked, cleaned, and ready to go, JR went at it spreading new tar over every inch of the roof. We discovered half way through that two buckets wasn't going to be enough, so I ran to get a third. I can't say that I ever want to go fetch another bucket of tar again, those suckers are heavy! Anyway, he got the whole thing done, and was probably sore and tired the next day.

Rather than just buying a couple buckets of tar like we planned, we ended up using 3 buckets of tar, 58 feet of rolled tin, half of a box of roofing nails, a couple sheets of plywood, and a dozen or so tubes of caulk. Ugh! It's only temporary, but it still beats the $10,000 (no, I didn't put an extra zero on that...) it would cost to have a flat rubber roof installed.