So, for some days after we started cutting out the old roof and
starting putting up the second story, our house was not under roof. It
was sort of under tarps, then it was under the subfloor of the new
floor for the second story, then it was sort of protected by the new
walls, then the joists for the ceiling of the new second story, then the
new rafters for the roof, then the new decking on the roof, and then
the new tar paper on the new decking on the new rafters over the new
second story at which point the lower story was protected from the
weather, though the roof was not quite finished with the new metal on it
yet.
In between all those thens, it rained. Several times.
On
one particularly rainy day, we had the second story walls up and many
of the new ceiling joists up to. But not enough to cover with the
tarps to keep the wet out.
So, we pulled out our wet
vacs and vacuumed the rain for about 8 1/2 hours. Luckily it wasn't
raining super hard the whole time - just continually.
We used a couple of vacs like this one:
and I'm happy to report that they were very
effective. Most of the time Eric's vac lives in his truck and mine
lives in my studio. They live quiet, uneventful lives, saving their
energy for emergencies.
Like basement floods or plumbing accidents or tidal waves of purple dye [Don't ask.]
Or
rain in house. These are the moments that wet vacs live for. It took
the four of us constant effort for 8 1/2 hours to keep the rain mostly
off the new floor [which was over the old house], but we managed to
avert total catastrophe in the structure below.
That
said, at the end of the night, after the rain had stopped, we went
downstairs to discover that the ceiling in our bedroom was bulging.
After evacuating our mattresses, Eric poked 9 holes in the ceiling to
release the rain water that had come in through the most open area in
the new construction and let the water run out into buckets - lots of
buckets. By the next morning, the drips had stopped and Eric sealed
up the holes. Crisis averted.
