Ice Dams and The Damage

Living in a 100 year old home when you have a lot of snow can be problematic, especially in a cottage style house where the roof line comes down to the level of the ceiling on the main floor.

This was taken in March 2011 there wasn't very much snow that year.  The roof ends below the ceiling, these the dinning room windows.  At the lower level of the centre peak is where we get the build up of ice.  In that slope upstairs there is built in draws.

These are the drawers,  there is no way to get into that area to place extra insulation.  Each of those drawers goes back towards the roof line hence heat loss.  This heat loss causes the snow to melt and it then freezes as the outside temperature drops well below freezing causing the ice dam.  I first realized we would have a problem when I noticed the crack in the dinning room ceiling.

After phoning and talking to a roofer we plugged in the heating wire that is on the roof outside.  This saved the dinning room ceiling, melting the snow and ice so the water would run off on the outside.  There has obviously been water problems in the past when you look closely at the crown molding in the dinning room.

You can tell that past damage has been covered over, unless you look closely you do not notice the water damage.  What we did not do was plug in the heating wire on the other side of that peak roof, we came home one day and I could hear dripping water.  The first place I checked was the dinning room, that was fine, so went into the living room only to find a very large pool of water in front of the couch and underneath the couch once I moved it out.  In the corner of the living room there was steady fast dripping of water.

It was dripping through the wood molding, but had spread out towards where the plant hanger is.  The hanger had absorbed some of the water, the majority had come through the moldings as you see from the water marks on the wood.  If we had drilled a small hole in the corner near the wood we may have saved this corner from a lot of this damage, hind sight is always 20/20.

We had some lovely icicles once we had the ice dams melting on the outside.

  

Just a few pictures of the icicles that we had once the heating coils were working.  Better to have the water outside like this than dripping in the house.  Now we did think this was the end of the water in the house but yesterday afternoon as Richard went upstairs he noticed a pool of water on the step in front of the door part way up the stairs.

This door is not original to the house and the dormer window, for the small bathroom also not original to the house, added to the ice dams in the back, the water came off the roof down between the door trim and frame.  If you look closely at the top of the door framing you can see where the water came in.  Richard went outside, got up onto the landing for this door, (there are steps for it anymore), and began the arduous task of removing ice from off the porch and pulling snow off the roof to limit the amount of snow to melt.  We do not have heating wires on this side of the house.  Richard did what he could to remove the ice by putting salt chunks on the roof where the ice was building up.  Today we have to water dripping.

So there you are, the joys of owning a 100 year old home when you have a larger amount of snow than you have had for several years.