A Lesson in Smugness

I really need to stop being smug about things.  Each time I am, another lesson is sent my way.  Here's the latest.

There is still a lot of snow up at Soldier Summit.   When there is this much snow,  roofs can develop ice damns as the snow melts. The water then drips to the edge & then re-freezes causing all sort of problems, but ultimately water ends up inside your cabin.  Never a good thing.

Our builder spent an enormous amount of time/thought making sure this wouldn't happen with our cabin.  When I went to our last HOA board meeting and heard talk of people's cabins past and present struggling with this, I was smug.  "Nothings wrong with our cabin, I thought."

You know where this is going, right?

A few days after this meeting, we decided to head up there for a quick overnighter.  We showed up around dinnertime, walked into the cabin and saw a small puddle of water on top of the pool table that was dripping from a fire sprinkler and another drip a few feet away coming out of the smoke detector. Weird.

This was especially odd because this drip was in the middle of the basement.  Water coming in from an ice damn wouldn't show itself in the middle of the basement and we knew it wasn't the fire sprinkler system because it is pressurized.  We also noticed that the leak stopped at night and started again the next afternoon.  A sure sign that melting snow on the roof was coming inside.

I'll shorten this story a bit.  Our builder came up on Monday, cut lots of holes in the ceilings and traced the leak to the back roof.  The roofers didn't put an oh-so-important piece where the shed roof met the main roof.  The snow was melting so fast on the roof, it was backing up, dripping into the house, spreading over the main floor until it found a hole and then dripped into the basement.

It was bad.  Bad enough that our builder had to tear out a lot of the flooring to dry out all of the wet wood.  Scott ended up on the roof shoveling 4' of snow off the roof so the roofers could come up and fix the problem.  As he was shoveling, all the snow started to slide off at once and Scott had to grab hold of the roof and hang on for his life so he wouldn't end up on the ground with the freshly fallen snow.

We have new flooring to buy and install and a lot of sheetrock to patch and paint.  Hopefully the roofers will cut us a check since it was their fault, but it still totally stinks.

So, here's the good news in all this.  It wasn't an ice damn! Yea!  And, we were so incredibly lucky that we went up on the day it started leaking into the house.  Had we not gone up, we would have had devastation up there.  And I'll try not to be smug any more.