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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Irving Roof that Could...n't but Did: Mount Roof.

We're roofing a rather large church project in Irving and does it ever have some strangeness to it. Since about 1984, really, I've been telling them that we couldn't fix a leak due to construction. Now I have to.
We did continual temporary fixes and slow'er down stuff but now it's Armageddon. The original building, the sanctuary, has a 4"x4" double tongue and groove (an old rock song too) deck/ceiling combination on about a 16/12 pitch. For the amateurs, cats don't crawl that. The barge rafters have angle iron on top and bottom, that causes a small parapet like feature, and the roofing had a solid soldered flashing around the whole perimeter. All this was capped with a porcelain coping like apparatus.
when the offices were built a foyer was built making the facade of the church and the weird terminus flashing/coping internal. The barge rafter continued from it's high peak downward through the new lower roof and into the new air space beneath the flat roof connecting the offices and the sanctuary.
Water followed the coping, for lack of a better term, into the small air cavity under the flat roof and into the foyer.
Pete Midgley, who got his master's degree in ceramics at the university of Dallas while working for me, and Larry Grabman, who was later found hanged by his five year old adoring son (and I'm still mad at him for that but he must have been suffering terribly) repaired the leak every few years for me. No one wanted to listen to my dread. Funny how crossing lives take disparate paths.
Years later a sloped roof was built over the flat roof, no plans drawn, and we had to put a combination of modified bitumen dead flat valleys, low slope applications of two ply felt and four inch exposure three tabs, gobs of step flashing, and blah blah blah. In Spanish that is habla bla bla.
Still leaked.
Now comes D-Day. Three roof tear off on Mount Everest.

First we removes the coping. Tore out the roofing and the deck around the rail road railing holding the rake edge of the barge rafter. We cut the angle iron, cut out some of the deck, and gave the water a place to flow.
Since words cannot adequately describe this situation, photos will be added.
To dream the impossible dream, to roof the impossible roof, to climb the highest church....
Now there's a hole in the eave and the water has no place to go but down the addition, past the old obstruction, and out onto the lowest part of the Judge Roy Scream.

to be continued on this same Bat channel.

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