An Editor's Weekend

Ice dams begone!

Ever wonder what the editor-in-chief of Fine Homebuilding does on the weekends? If I'm lucky, I work on my house. About 12 years ago, I bought a 200-year-old timber-framed Cape on a little hill overlooking the East Aspetuck River in Connecticut's Litchfield County. It was a tiny place that had suffered considerable abuse over the years (note the aluminum siding on the shed dormer), but there was a certain gnarled dignity about the house that made me want to preserve it. That, and it was all I could afford.

I've done a lot since buying the place: poured a slab in the basement, rebuilt the bathroom addition that you see in the foreground of the photo, remodeled the kitchen, added a two-story addition to the south side. But of course, I'm nowhere near done, and last November, I suffered one of the worst indignities that can befall a serial remodeler on a long-term project: I had to stop progress on the remodel to remodel something that I had already remodeled.

The roof over the kitchen and the bathroom had always suffered some pretty serious ice dams, mostly because heat leaked into them from unremodeled, uninsulated parts of the house. Truth be told, though, it probably wasn't the ice dams themselves that caused the shingles to fail prematurely; it was me going up on the roof, in a fit of rage, and chopping at the ice in the dark with a hatchet after coming home to find water dripping out of my new kitchen cabinets.

The project took me a couple of weekends. I tore off the old shingles, put down Grace Ice & Water Shield this time, then reroofed with 25-year shingles. I may even stuff some insulation into the cavities leaking heat into the roof. And I'm definitely going to ignore the fact that the siding needs repainting, at least until spring.