DAY TWELVE DISASTERS

We’ve had our fair share of dramatic house issues since we bought our first home all the way back in 2014—our bathroom sink falling through the floor (whoever first thought chipboard in a bathroom was a good idea?), structural rot in an exterior wall, our garage roof springing a leak on Christmas Eve and shorting out the door opener, water damage in the shower that was only discovered when selling—but all those issues, annoying though they’ve been, had one thing in common: they happened when we’d already been in the house a good long while.

Not this time.

We knew, thanks to our building inspection, that there were spots in the roof that needed attention. Our plan was to settle in before deciding what we wanted to prioritise amongst the things we needed to get a professional in, and the roof was one of the things on that list. But, unfortunately for us, that choice was taken out of our hands a little bit. 

It started in the gaming room. Josh was running a Dungeons & Dragons game, and just to add a bit of atmosphere to the adventure, towards the end of the night a steady drip, drip, drip started from the ceiling. Josh, in quintessential Kiwi Ingenuity fashion, wrapped a facecloth around the beam that was dripping and clamped it in place to contain the dripping until we could get a professional in. As we often do for the tasks we can’t do ourselves, we turned to BuildersCrack to track down a roofer. A few days later, someone came out and hammered down some loose nails that he said would have let the water in.

And then the living room ceiling started bulging.

Thank goodness we were home—Josh drilled a few holes in the ceiling to let the water out, and once water had stopped dribbling into every bucket we had in the house (not enough, as we learned—we’ve since bought more!) we pulled down all the damp ceiling material.

Turns out the ceiling needed a patch, and nailing down the loose sheet of roof actually dislodged a bunch of water that had already gotten in and sent it careening towards the living room instead. So that was fun. Suddenly we were getting a roofer and a ceiling team in, one to patch the roof itself and the other to fix up this giant gaping hole in our ceiling. We probably could have done the ceiling patch ourselves, but we’ve never done it before, so it definitely wouldn’t have been this tidy.

All we have left to do now is paint, but it’s tidy enough that we’re going to leave that until we’re repainting the whole room. Here’s hoping we now get a bit of a break before the next drama!