Dining room roof Before

Boy, posting has gotten sparse, hasn't it? Sorry about that (especially to you, Mystery Seventh Follower). But it was all up to technical problems - specifically, I'd taken the Before pictures of the dining room roof with my daughter's camera, and we couldn't find the cable. Today, I found the cable! So here's the before on the dining room roof.

I've uploaded this at 1MB, twice the resolution I've been stingily using here on The House, because there's a lot of information in this picture. (Click it for the big version.) But the upshot is: this roof on the embayment on the north side was raining through the ceiling to a serious extent, and it's the first work I've paid to have done on The House. So it's a landmark decision.

The roof was covered in tar, over shingles, over tin (sigh), and the box gutters were rotted, as is the general case throughout the building. On the left point where the box gutter is flush to the brick, you can see a gray line running upwards, then to the right. That, my friends, is a live power wire, which leads out the basement window, over the dining room, and through the brick wall into the bathroom of the blue room. !! No, this is not compliant with code anywhere except possibly in Nigeria. It is dangerous. I'm pretty sure that's the power to the Blue Room, though. I don't know yet. Wiring will therefore be figuring in my life in the upcoming months.

This picture also shows the interesting vertical crack down from the second-story bathroom window (the leaded window in the upper left). That was obviously another full-sized window, probably another bedroom, that was bricked in with a smaller window when the bathtub was put in. It - like the rest of the house - is crying out for tuck pointing.

I have bought a grout bag (a $5.26 investment at Lowe's) for said tuck pointing. Way easier, I'm told, than troweling it all in. I'll update you on that when I get started.

Here's a view from the top of the left-hand end of the box gutter. Sigh. I can only feel good about the fact that all this is historical now; it's already history. But this nice little hole is responsible for a three-foot-wide strip of moldering plaster and sagging wallpaper in the dining room below it. Also, if you're into flashing, you can cringe with me looking at the upper right of this photo. If you've never considered how roofs are supposed to interface with brick, please have my assurances that this is not it.

Flabbergastingly, the underlying structure of this roof was sound. It was all original timber, dating to about 1910 when they built the embayment and presumably put in the buffet and the woodwork. We had to replace some of the 1x planks in the roof and shore up two rafters that had suffered water damage, but otherwise, this roof just got a new surface. At the edge, we replaced the old box gutter with an angled affair which I'll show you later (that camera is in the car, and not here right now). Turns out that the brick goes right up to the top corner on the roof, so we couldn't substantially change its shape.

Anyway, more later. I've nearly finished the bathroom window, and the current top item is baseboard heating (I've bought the heaters and gotten the permit - halfway done! Ha!) But as it is Labor Day, work is calling.