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for the continued damage that related
to a choice in repair or maintenance
materials prior to my showing up at the
building.
An example will illustrate the
true cost of deferred maintenance. The
example: a roof leak.
During the 103-year life span of a
building, there was a cycle of repeated
damage and repairs. My project was
to address a water leak in this building
during the winter.
In New England we have a
condition called ice dams. This
condition occurs when a building is
insulated with, in this case, blownin
insulation. The weak spot in most
insulation jobs on historic structures is
the ventilation of the eaves, where the
insulation is missed and the building’s
heat is allowed to escape.
The second condition, for this
building, was that the slate roof was
replaced with asphalt shingles. One of
the properties of slate roofs — besides
being rock, and therefore very durable
and easy to maintain — is that snow and
ice slide off them with incredible ease.
Asphalt shingles keep the snow in place.
Ice dams are formed when the
escaping heat melts the snow at the
eaves of the roof. The water then runs to
the edge of the roof and freezes. After a
number of freeze cycles a sizable dam of
ice was built up and a pool of water was
backed up behind it, eventually deep
enough to run under the shingles and
leak into the building in what can only
be called a fl ood.
These conditions resulted in
substantial damage to the plaster.
Repeatedly. Since those choices were
made, the plaster had been repaired
a number of times, all with varying
degrees of success.
The roof was replaced with asphalt
6 ◆ www.Hawk-n-Trowel.com ◆ Spring 2008
Terra cotta in a state of decay.
shingles for two reasons: There was
no one who knew how to fi x the slate
when it was in need of maintenance, and
asphalt shingles were less expensive.
The building walls were insulated
with blown-in insulation to save money
during the 1970s. Insulating the walls
of your historic building will save you
somewhere around 10 percent on your
heating bill if it is done correctly.
Maintenance that
protects the building
from damage is
ultimately less
expensive than repairs
when water pours in.
The plaster repair was done with
modern bagged gypsum plaster, which,
when it so much as looks at water, falls
apart. Had the repair been done with
a lime plaster like what originally had
been used, the repairs and what was left
of the original plaster would have been
more durable in the face of the water
infi ltration from the current round of ice
dams.
Problems started to show up as
plaster damage. I found evidence of at
least four plaster repairs, all with the
wrong choice of materials. This round of
repairs that started in the 1970s with two
“unrelated choices” will cost the owners
of this building in excess of $16,000.
I don’t know how much the last three
repair cycles cost. Additionally, water
fi ltering down through the building’s
infrastructure will cause slow damage
from dry rot, among other things. Did
insurance pay for the damage? Yes and
no. There is never enough compensation
for the long-term damage done to a
building in the name of repair.
Maintenance that protects the
building from damage is ultimately
less expensive than repairs when water
pours in.
A second example of the cost of
deferred maintenance is a house that
had a dry-laid brick patio. The bricks
were laid in a bed of sand over a gravel
base. This was too diffi cult to maintain.
The bricks were pulled up, a gravel base
laid down and a 4-inch pad of concrete
poured over the gravel up to the terracotta
block from which the house was
made. The bricks were hard-mortared
into place.
I was called in when the exterior
render showed signs of falling off. I
went up and repaired the stucco. The
next year I was called to task because
the stucco had fallen off just like the
previous repair. I had a meeting with
the architect, the contractor and the
owner. We reviewed the drawings,