Ice Dam

Remember that phone call we got about the ceiling leaking? Flash forward. We have the situation under control now and learned a few things about how to handle an ice dam. Firstly, we should have seen the signs. They were written on the wall roof. We know the deal now and have to say, it’s not so much fun. A little preventative maintenance is much better than a whole lot of cleanup.

So what is an ice dam?

Looks a little something like this:

 

Oh hmmm yes. It does look rather familiar:

 

Remember our big icicle friend from February?

But that’s all behind us now. Joe spent a whole evening clearing off snow and even ran a heat coil across the rooftop to melt away whatever ice was left. Kinda like the thermal stripes on your rear windshield you use to defrost your car.

Here’s what we walked into. Yuck.

Smack dab in the middle of the living room. Bucket catching water below.

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We dried everything before trying to fix it.

We gathered supplies: Putty, Quick Patch Ceiling Popcorn, and Kilz Paint/Primer to seal out moisture.

First, we had to chip away the ceiling paint that got damaged.

And get the surface ready for the putty fill after Kilz.

That part was fairly simple.

Joe is darn good with the putty knife. I’m jealous.

After that dried, we taped off the area to spackle it:

This part was kind of fun. It looked like a giant jellyfish in the sky floating around.

We spread a plastic sheet down and prepared to popcorn her up!

The first can went pretty smoothly.

The second, not so much…

So we went to the store for another can, took a breather and tried again.

And we finished!

Just waiting to add a coat of white and hopefully all will be back to normal. Without needed to repaint the entire ceiling white. Fingers crossed!

Wall

But that’s not the end of the ballgame, folks. We needed to check the wall to be sure no water leaked in through the overhang/soffit outside. I checked the crawlspace under the stairs and everything was dry. Joe cut a hole in the wall with a sawzall and everything looked dry there too. Whew!

But now we have this ^ Beautiful.

Safety first when you’ve got insulation. Itchy itchy.

Now that we’ve got a gaping hole in this lovely orange wall, what do we do?

Put a little brace behind it and patch her up, that’s what.

Cut a new piece of sheetrock and you move on with life I guess.

After we got that in place we patched and painted it.

Hopefully not needing another coat, since we ran out of paint!

Grateful

Whew, I think that about sums up a couple of our weekend afternoons! This could have all been a whole lot worse. We’re so lucky the wall didn’t need to be replaced. Or ceiling or roof for that matter! Has anyone dealt with a similar situation? I know a few of you have roof snow rakes. How well do those work? For future reference.

Joe and I both disliked ceiling popcorn before any of this. Now I think we dislike it even more. The orange peel ceiling texture looks interesting. Anyone tried it? Or have alternatives?