For two weeks I'd been checking the ceiling under the dormer valley every night with a flashlight. On Sunday morning, February 1st, Tessa found the stain from bed, in daylight, without getting up. "Kyle. The ceiling." It was a brown ring about the size of a dinner plate on the sloped part of the ceiling, right below the valley I wrote about in January, with a darker center that was still damp to the touch.
We'd had two days in the mid-30s after a lot of snow. The valley ice I'd been fighting with a roof rake and a calcium chloride sock had backed up enough water to find a way in.
First, stop the water
Before anything else I went out with the roof rake, pulled every bit of snow I could reach out of the valley and pushed a fresh calcium chloride sock up onto the ice. By that afternoon there was a channel through the dam and water running into the gutter instead of under the shingles. Inside, I set a towel and a bucket under the spot, which turned out to be theater. Nothing dripped. The water had soaked into the drywall and the insulation behind it and stopped there.
Then the moisture meter came out. The $30 pin meter I bought last August has earned its keep several times over, and this was one of them. Dry ceiling elsewhere read 8 or 9 percent on the drywall scale. The middle of the stain read at the top of the meter's scale, and the wet zone ran about a foot past the visible ring in two directions.
The phone call before the decision
Our homeowners policy has a $2,500 deductible. We chose that when we switched insurers last July, knowing it meant we'd pay for small things ourselves. This was the first time we had to find out what "small" meant.
On Monday morning I called our agent and asked it as a hypothetical, which he said plenty of people do. I described the stain and asked how a claim like that would usually go. He walked me through the general process and said that with our deductible, a repair in the hundreds of dollars probably wouldn't come out ahead, but that it was our call and he'd help either way.
That evening a drywall guy a coworker uses came by and quoted $640 to cut out, patch, tape and spot-prime it, with painting left to us. $640 against a $2,500 deductible made the claim question easy, and we didn't file. If the number had been close to the deductible, or if the framing had been damaged, we'd have had a much longer conversation with the agent. That conversation belongs with your own agent and your own policy.
The $186 fix
I started Tuesday night and worked on it the rest of the week, mostly in the evenings.
- Cut it out. Plastic sheeting taped around the area, an N95, and the new oscillating multi-tool to cut a rectangle about 2 by 3 feet, a little past the wet readings. The old kraft-faced batt in that rafter bay was damp along its bottom edge, so that piece went into a contractor bag.
- Dry it. We carried the dehumidifier up from the basement (it sits unplugged in winter anyway) and pointed a box fan into the opening. I checked the rafter and the drywall edges with the meter every evening. It took four days for everything to read the same as the dry ceiling around it. Without the meter I'd have closed it up on day two.
- Close it up. A new piece of batt, 1x3 backer strips screwed in along the edges of the hole, a patch cut from a 2-by-4 panel of half-inch drywall, paper tape and setting compound, then two coats of lightweight compound.
- Seal the stain. Water stains bleed through ordinary paint, so the patch and a ring of old ceiling around it got a shellac-based Zinsser stain blocker this morning, and the flat white went on after lunch.
The receipts: drywall panel $14, backer strips and screws $16, batt $29, compound and tape $26, Zinsser primer $28, a quart of ceiling white $19, plastic, tape, blades and sanding sponges $24, a jab saw I barely used $12 and a box of N95s $18. Total, $186.
My mistake was the first coat of compound. I laid it on thick, overhead, on a slope, and gravity had opinions. It sagged into a lip that took twenty minutes of sanding to undo. Three thin coats would have been faster than one fat one.
The patch disappears if you don't know where to look. The trouble is that the rest of the slope is now a slightly different white than the patch, and that's how this turned into a whole-bedroom repaint next weekend. Tessa has already taped up color samples. I suspect I'm not choosing.
