Typical day

Membrane gutter repairs. You never know how it’s going to go. Will the cleaning be easy or require serious elbow grease? How long will the patches need to cure before we can install them? Does all the flashing need to be removed? Today’s hidden gutter membrane job in Burnaby was no different than any other rubber gutter job except that the original installers dog-ear folded all corners. I’ve never seen that strategy used before! On a house that was under spec’d for gutter drains this installation method caused serious water damming. It wasn’t a totally bad idea as it reduced the amount of seams in the EPDM that would require patches…EXCEPT they nailed these folds down afterwards and left the nails exposed. It’s leaked like a sieve since Day 1. I’m amazed but never surprised by some of the moronic things I see on roofs. I wish I had $10 for every time I thought “How could someone consider that a good detail?”. I’d be able to buy my kids a new pair of shoes every month! It’s that bad out there. So the challenge today was to try and figure out how to remove the EPDM rubber membrane build up caused by the folded dog-ear corners and still be able to put our patches on after ward. I wish they had of taught me that in school. But then again who would have thought that would have ever been done in the first place 🙂 I guess the moral to today’s blog is that there is no such thing as a “typical day”. I keep on learning new things.