Sunday At 4:00a, Toby woke me up with dreaded news. The ceiling crack was growing and the rain water was pouring in. It had been continuously raining all night. I went outside, climbed up on to the roof and saw that there were many areas of the tarp that had formed pools of water and were continuing to collect water and were growing. I went inside and saw that the crack had grown in the few minutes that I had been on the roof. I realized that the water had to come off the roof. So I grabbed my little 1 gallon shop vac and prepared to suck the water off the roof. But at 1 gallon at a time, I knew it was going to be a tedious process. So I grabbed the big 5 gallon, 2.5 horsepower shop vac that we had and took it up to the roof. I plugged it in and began ‘vac-ing’ the water off the roof. It only took about 20 seconds to fill up the shop vac, and about a minute to drain it. One thing about the shop vac was that the switch was broken. So I had to plug it in to turn it on and unplug it to turn it off. It made me very nervous to be doing that over and over in the rain on the roof in the dark standing in puddles of water. But I survived. I filled and drained the shop vac 11 times, keeping a running count in my head. I couldn’t believe that I had shop vac’d 55 gallons of water off the roof. By the 11th round, it was beginning to get light and while waiting for the water to drain out I read that the shop vac was not a 5 gallon shop vac, but a 16 gallon model! I stopped keeping track of how much water I pulled off the roof at that point, but it was nearly 200 gallons, all before 7 am. And the rain kept coming down. At 6a, I had called my dad and asked him to come back to help me make some new roof trusses over the front of the house. Help was on its way. Going under the roof tarps, I had seen that the pooling tarps were collecting the water and then filling up the space between the floor joists, with the weight of the water pushing the drywall down. So when I removed the water, the pressure on the ceiling was relieved. Toby said she watched the ceiling return to a more slightly normal position. Although there was no (less, it was still raining) water weight pushing on the roof, the drywall was still soaked and had popped many of its nails. The wet drywall had no strength and was continuing to come down, the crack was very wide and seemed to be only held together by the paint! At that time I realized the ceiling was going to come down. When Max and Lucy woke up, I had pointed out the ceiling and told then that they were not to go under it. They stayed in the living room. I was running around trying to find my tape measure in the house in order to get measurements of what needed to be shored up when the ceiling came down with a crash. (God was gracious among this whole ordeal. If I had been able to find my tape measure, I would have been working under the ceiling when it fell.) I ran in to the living room and scooped up Lucy who was about 3 feet away from the edge of what had fallen. She was a bit shocked. Toby didn’t say a word to me, she just got on the phone and called her friend Stephanie. Stephanie came right over and picked up the kids and volunteered her husband Mike to help out. Toby cried and cried when Stephanie arrived, then she gave Stephanie a bag of clothes and the kids (with their bag of breakfast pretzels) and they were gone. Stephanie had agreed to take the kids to church and keep them while we worked. The rain let up and we just had some slight misting. My dad arrived and Mike (Stephanie’s husband) showed up and I went up on to the roof wearing my yellow slicker to figure out what kind of truss situation we would need. We figured that out and began to plan it out when Jeff Weinbender showed up and said ‘How can I help?’ It turns out that the Jeff’s mom was with them for church and so they had driven by the house to show her the construction. Justina had pointed out the house by saying ‘It’s the one with the guy in the yellow slicker on the roof.’ When they got to church, Jeff walked back over to my house, ready to help out. With Mike and Jeff’s help, we were able to give some ‘fall’ to the roof in areas where there hadn’t been any before. Having those two extra sets of hands made getting the plywood onto the roof so much easier. About noon, Justina came by with pizza and grub for the working crew. Jeff had to leave after lunch. I went to Lowe’s to get some new pieces of drywall for the inside, and Mike and my dad kept working on the new ridge of the roof. The rain was still holding back. When I got back from Lowe’s, Mike and Pop had completed the roof framing and were finishing up replacing the tarps. Mike took off and my dad and I tackled the drywall situation inside. I thought that we would be done by 5p. At 9:30p my dad left. I was so tired I decided to stay home on Monday to help the family recuperate.
You can see the bulges in the ceiling along the edges.
