David was working from home, I wasn’t doing much except tinkering with something online. Andthen I heard an ominous tick-tick-pat-pat sound from upstairs.
There was no question either of us were getting on the road this morning, especially as the street wasn’t really driveable until about 830am, and the local drivers tend to get stuck in intersections a lot because of either bad snow driving skills, or bad snowplowing methods. Either way, people tend to get hung up on big moraines of plowed snow that cross the intersections at right angles, because the municipal plows just plow the streets in the village, while IDOT is responsible for the state highways that are the main arterials.
They literally work at cross-purposes sometimes, which means cars driven by people who don’t know how to drive in snow get stuck.
So anyway, about 2 1/2 hours ago we had just finished up some lunch and David was about to get back to work on his project, when I heard the tap-tap sound upstairs. Went up and found that water was seeping down the hall bath vent/light fixture, and as there’s been water damage there before, we figured out it’s a problem whenever we’ve had lots of wind with rain. It blows in the vents in the gable ends and in through the attic fan housing, but the snow last night was so light and fine and the wind was so strong that it got blown right in, through screening and vent slats alike. When David popped his head up in the attic, he saw a mound of snow had settled right over the bedroom, and another one right over the bath area.
After messing about finding stuff, we decided it was easiest to wet-vac the lightest stuff up, and then scoop the rest up along with a bit of insulation into a bucket. Then David laid out sheets of heavy 8-mil plastic above the insulation to catch any future snow. We’ll have a proper repair job done as soon as feasible; the former owners were aware of the problem and “fixed” it by taping a piece of cardboard over one of the vents, which the strong blasts of blizzaster wind blew off.
Every indoor window is drifted up and we’re now discussing whether the snow rake David bought a few years ago is going to come in play.
The quickie repair job David did was not all that easy – he had to work balanced on the joists up there surrounded by loose insulation, and it was my job to run from the spare room to the basement and back fetching buckets, scoops, bits of stuff for the small wet-dry vac, and other gadgets. I got a pretty good workout today, anyway.
Yep, time to put the snow boots on and mess with the snow rake, looks like.
