LESLIE: Cindy in Louisiana, you’ve got The Money Pit. Tell us all about your roofing problems.
CINDY: We have a camp and it’s got a – it’s a metal building with a – the pitch on the roof – there’s several different layers of the pitch. It goes down and so let’s be like three different pitches on it. We had it put in, oh, probably in ’07 or ’08. And then, around 2011, we decided to pull off that plastic-wrap insulation off the inside of the roof and spray on some of the spray insulation on it. And once we did that, that’s when we started noticing the leaks.
So, we tried different things. We even had another company come out, pull out all the screws and put it new ones that were a little fatter and so – with the washers and all that mess with them, to seal it. That has not worked.
We’ve been up there on that roof I don’t know how many different times, trying to put silicone on top of the screws after we clean it down along the seams. Sometimes, we’ve even had to get up there and he’s had to pull out the screw, put silicone in and put the screw back in. It’s just been an absolute nightmare to try.
TOM: You said these are metal roof panels? Is it like corrugated roof? What kind of metal roof is it?
CINDY: Right. It is. It’s like a corrugated roof.
TOM: So they’re big metal panels, right?
CINDY: Right.
TOM: When you try to replace these screws, I guess you’re essentially taking the panels almost off the roof, right, because you’re removing all the fasteners?
CINDY: Yeah. Well, we can’t – with the spray and everything else, we had even thought about could we take the roof off and start over. And now, with the spray down on it, we can’t even do that.
TOM: Oh, so this spray is actually up on the underside of the metal roof itself?
CINDY: Right. So it’s glued down now.
TOM: Oh, boy. So there was basically no sheathing or anything underneath this?
CINDY: No. When we started this project, we started it with someone who we thought – we didn’t know anything and we thought the person knew everything. And now we know better but we messed up and now we’re kind of caught in a bad position.
TOM: So, yeah, it’s not a good situation. Because it’s kind of hard to try to repair something that probably wasn’t put in well to begin with. So I have one idea for you and that is to put in another layer of roofing over the roofing that you have now but put ice-and-water shield in between the layers.
So, ice-and-water shield is very effective at sealing these kinds of leaks. It’s specifically designed to seal around fasteners. And if you were to – if it was possible for you to put another layer of metal roofing over this but put ice-and-water shield in between, that would definitely stop the leaks from happening.
Short of that, I think this is a situation where the roof has to come off and you really have to do it right from the get-go, because I don’t think – the roof was just put on, I guess, over some sort of furring strips or something like that. There was never any ice-and-water shield underneath that. And so I’m not surprised that it does leak, especially from driving rain. I don’t think you can rely just on the fasteners or even fasteners that have rubber gaskets on them to keep that kind of a roof completely leak-free.
CINDY: Alright. Well, I tried. Thank you.
TOM: Alright. Good luck with that project. Thanks for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT, 888-666-3974.
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