Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Those builder problems ...... resolved?

Forgot to post about it yesterday, but we had the builder round on Friday to look at the problems with the roof and that bloody leaky pipe.

The roof is now onto part two of a three part plan to finally sort it. Part 1 was coming round and sealing the cavity wall drip trays that were dripping into the attic above Molly's room.
Part two was waterproofing the exterior brickwork and finally, on Friday the bloke coming round to waterproof the interior cement used to seal the drip trays to stop water moving through that.
Part three is the roofers coming out to look at water dripping through a roof vent and salts coming in tat the apex of the roof.
Hopefully once all this is done we will be completely dry and watertight. Hopefully.

The good news is that the bloke came round and sealed the interior of the attic and told us, with much needed authority, that the wall up there was absolutely bone dry now.

I like builders to be authoritative. The one thing most likely to set me off on the road to despair is having some builder scratch his head and tell me he has no idea what the matter is.

Then he looked at the pipe. It looks like, according to him, the joint is slightly off and the pipe runs slightly uphill to meet the external joint pointing slihtly downhill.. This means that the gush of water from the shower doesn't cause a drip. It's the last dregs that will sit in the slight depression where the pipe and the joint meet. Hence the drip.
All he could do is seal it up and tell us to keep an eye on it.
Which, as you can guess, I am.

He also told us that if some water does drip into the external layer of brickwork, it's not the end of the world as it will drain away and shouldn't cross the cavity to show on the inside. Not the most reassuring thing but it's nice to hear someone listening to our worries.

In the end he summed it up nicely by saying that he could well understand our doom and gloom as so many things had gone wrong and were taking so long to fix. (I say our doom and gloom - Louise was there putting on the doom and gloom as well. But really I just mean my doom and gloom. Louise handles this sort of stuff far better than I).

So, it's sorted.
Sort of.

[update January 20th 2009 - no it's bloody not]

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