“Sunshine” is not a new word, just a new experience. Yes, we finally had a long weekend of beautiful sun. Now, our challenge is how much of the eight inch ice base on top of our gutters and the first few rows of shingles can we break through without destroying our roof.
I tapped the gutters with a hammer, and it was like banging on concrete with a rubber mallet. There must be ten pounds of ice per foot on our gutters, to say nothing of the weight of eighteen inches of snow on the roof.
As for the downspouts, they are nothing more than a twenty foot ice column that probably won’t thaw until Easter.
How about water backing up under the flashing into the soffits and draining down the inside of the window sashes? Hopefully the 3/8 inch drain holes that we drilled into the soffits will provide an alternative escape route for the water—outside, not inside! It's like ice fishing upside down as the icey water runs down the drill and my arm as soon as I break through. So far, the makeshift drains are working. I just have to remember to poke through ice in the holes each morning and to fill them in before bee season.
Winter really is a lot of work and requires a few common sense preventative measures to make it through, but the beauty of it far outweighs the consequences, so far anyway. I just hope ingenuity prevails over foolishness as we combat the unusually high volume of ice and snow that we are getting this year.
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