At 5:30 a.m., we got up and checked, and the garbage can was half full.
Jen went up to Massachusetts without me, and I put a tarp over the roof of the bay. I was not sure how much use that would be, but it was all I could think of doing, and the dripping did stop. Since there was no actual fixing that could be done until the rain stopped, I went up to Massachusetts myself.
Then, at 7 a.m. today, we got a text from one of the tenants. We have extremely non-complainy tenants, so when we hear from them, something is either leaking or on fire. Indeed, the window in her bedroom was leaking from the top. A few hours later, the window upstairs from that was leaking. And the doorframe between the bathroom and the bedroom.
I had really been hoping that the culprit here would turn out to be the roof of the bay window in our kitchen. That's about four square feet of crisis to deal with. The problem, however, was clearly on the roof of the building, since the entire back of the house was leaking.
We got an early train home (luckily, since as we went south the tracks were flooding and we well might have gotten the last train out of Boston), surveyed the sad sad situation, and said to each other, The only thing this could possibly be that wouldn't be a complete disaster would be a problem with the gutter. Of course, that means there's probably a split the size of the Grand Canyon in the roof. We went up with extreme trepidation, and lo and behold, the gutter was full of water which was flowing over the side and down the house. Jen pulled some crap out of the downspout, and the water obediently vanished. For once, it was not the worst-case scenario.
Here's the crap that was in the downspout.
The work glove was the biggest culprit, but it was caught on a homemade screen of--do you recognize it? Hint: Satan's office is decorated with it. The road to hell is lightly scattered with good intentions over a bed of it. It is used as a general-purpose building material only by the insane or the extremely evil. Yes: wire lath.
