While that is a quote from President John F. Kennedy’s January 11, 1962 State of the Union address it became real here at Cliftoria today. There was a shining sun set in blue skies when the roofers appeared this morning and set to work.
Roofers at work
The top bathroom’s roof has been replaced with new corrugated iron. This is very exciting because we are quite sure that with this roof repair we will no longer have any leaks from the main roof. We can now start work on the fallen ceilings below. However, first we will need to find the money to do the ceiling work. At the very least it will no longer get any worse.
A picture taken some time ago
The new roof below the TV antenna. The green top of the open bathroom window can be seen.
This is a view of the new roof from that window.
This is the old iron.
The old galvanised iron is quite rusty and had bowed in the centre allowing water to pool on the roof instead of running off. It had rusted through in places and been ‘repaired’ with some sort of duct tape. The tape may have worked as a repair for a while but had given up working who knows how many years ago. It is no wonder that it was leaking so much.
Close up of the old ‘repair’ work.
Also the short piece of gutter and very long down pipe on the west side of the house have also been renewed.
Old gutter and plastic down pipe
Shiny new replacement
I cannot begin to say how much better I feel now that this work is complete. With every big rainfall we could hear the dripping of water into various containers set out in the two ceiling damaged rooms. I have been worried about water getting down from the first floor rooms and into the two rooms below on the ground floor. That would have increased the damage a lot. I have not been able to find any evidence that was happening so we may be lucky and the damage is confined to what we know about. We are waiting now for the next big storm to see if this work has finally solved our main roof problems. I’m pretty confident that it will be fine.
Replacing the gutter. Picture taken from the top floor hall window. The new box gutter in the foreground was replaced well over a year ago. The iron roof behind the gutter is next door’s roof.
Cliftoria, an adventure in restoration 
Duct tape? Egad.
That does make me feel slightly better about the state of my house. The corro is in reasonable repair although it’s lifting in places and one piece is rusty. But the chimney is about to fall down … I can understand why fixing the roof would make you feel a whole lot better.
It is like duct tape but isn’t duct tape. As far as I can find out it is called sealing tape. I dare say it will work for quite some time but this tape was obviously well past its working life.
Thanks. I won’t think quite so little of the perpetrators, then 😉
That is a monumental milestone – well done you Two! Im sure the place loves you just as much as you love it – we love it too!
Oh my, how did I miss this. looks like lots of fun.