Adventures in Ice Damming

Ice damming is no picnic. It came to us through our sun room and front entrance. On a sunny afternoon in late January we heard water dripping. Soon we had assembled buckets and bowls underneath the biggest leaks and even perched small pitchers and cups on a heavy wall mirror to catch every drop. It didn’t take long before fissures had opened down the walls and paint began bubbling from enough leaks to sink a yacht. We know for a fact that this hadn’t happened in our house since at least 1974! The deep freeze from the first polar vortex, then slight thawing and then refreeze created some great opportunities for water and gravity to make new inroads. Several of us worked on chopping away at the mass of ice on our roof with garden tools and shovels before it was finally dislodged.
We will be trying hard to ignore the new topo maps on our walls until warmth is here to stay. The good news? We live in a 1917 house with plaster walls. If the walls were made of drywall we would be dealing with a ticking time bomb of mold growth!