It’s been a rough spring for the Anne Marie. As the weather warmed up, we started spending more time in there, and began construction of a new unit. It came together quickly, and we set our eyes on installing the woodstove. Taking a closer look at the section set aside for the woodstove, we noticed some water damage on the plywood subfloor and water marks on the insulation on the walls.
Oh crap. What’s going on?
Alright – everything out! Yes, that is mold you see growing on our plywood. We yanked out the subfloor and the insulation underneath, then the insulation and spray foam in the walls.
It turns out we have leaks at most of our windows. It isn’t clear from the photo, but water was getting in from the sides and bottoms of the windows where 25 year old caulk had just given up. We had a taste of this back in the fall, but we were pretty sure the worst was behind us.
The water runs down the ribs to the floor, where it sat underneath the insulation for long after it had rained. At the edges, it would travel up along the sides of the insulation, and reach the plywood subfloor. Bad news.
The good news is that it seems the water is only coming in from the windows and below. We have zero signs of leaks from the roof, and our ceiling still looks great! I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t make us reconsider the whole project. If we had leaks coming in from the roof, I think we’d have thrown in the towel.
As it is, we just have to yank out the windows and put some new caulk in around them.
The windows come out surprisingly easily, which is a relief. Sealing them up again has been a bit of a challenge. This brings us up to date: we’re still re-sealing the windows, and parts of the walls that are leaking. We’ve had some success caulking windows, and some failures. We’re not really sure what causes the newly caulked windows to leak, and that’s a huge frustration.
I really dislike doing things twice, and this has been a rough few months on us as well, but there’s no way around it if we want this to work. There is an unacceptable amount of water coming into our living area, and we have to stop it.
