Walls, Roofs & Flower Beds

A parapet is a wall that extends above the roof line.
Our living room has six walls. All six extend to parapets,
as do all exterior bedroom walls.
That's a scupper in the middle.

Of the three — walls, roofs and flower beds — the most damaging was the flower bed. The culprit is water, which by itself is pretty odd given that we live in a desert, albeit one of the earth's wetter deserts.

Walls and roofs are supposed to keep water outside of a house. Well, apparently rainfall in the Sonoran Desert is sufficiently unusual that architects and builders need not bother themselves too much about it. Take our concrete paved backyard and swimming pool apron, for example. They slope towards the house. Come heavy monsoon rains — an annual affair most monsoon seasons — water flooded under the two back doors into the house.

Flat roofs are common here: flatter than your sewer pipe which by code has to slope at least a quarter inch to the foot.

The living room wall where the insulation and framing
were littered with ancient rodent droppings. After
demolition and chlorine, nice and clean.

Our roof is typical. It is so flat that water puddles with dew even on a clear morning. But hey, coat the flat roof with that white elastomeric polymer stuff. It's very good stuff, actually. But if you read the teeny tiny print on the container, in both English and Spanish, it's not recommended for flat roofs that puddle.

From my observation, my explanation is because it ever so slowly but surely dissolves and erodes the coating. You need a new coat every couple of years, if not more often.

Stucco walls are common here. Stucco covers the stick built frame. Stucco is also good stuff but, like the roof, it needs maintenance to remain water tight. Like many houses here, ours has parapets: walls that extend above the roof. The tops of those walls are stuccoed and they are boundaries between what roofers roof and what painters paint. They are directly exposed to sunshine and weather.

Parapets also have scuppers in them, metal channels to drain rainwater. Stucco (basically, cement and sand), metal (the scuppers themselves) and polymer elastomeric all expand and contract differently. Plus, having reached in myself with a brush generously dipped in elastomeric it's almost impossible to get a good coat inside the six-by-four opening that is twelve inches deep. So you get cracks and gaps.

Parapets, scuppers, and stucco are architecturally pretty. They also can be maintenance nightmares. 

The north wall which was covered with
cat claw vine. Yours truly broke up the
solid line of masonry that held the
flower bed planter against the stucco
wall. It was this area where Vinny replaced
wall board in the bedroom on the inside.

Then we have flower beds. If you put them next to the stucco walls — I mean the soil rests against the bottom foot or two of the stucco, even above the concrete foundation — you are asking for trouble. That's what the previous owners did, Auggie and Karen, and who knows how many other previous owners in the five decade history of this house. Yes, there is a tar paper lining between the soil and the stucco, but if you do a lot of watering, which Auggie and Karen did, the sprinklers throw water on the walls.

All we knew when we bought the place was there was so much damage to the north side that Auggie and Karen's broker, Vinny "Cover & Conceal" Yackanin, had his slap and dash crew tear out and replace wall board inside the north bedrooms, dig out all the house-hugging flower beds, and replace the soil with cheap one-inch crushed rock.

Vinny also had his crew put a coat of elastomeric on the roof to hide decades of neglect, leaks, and rotten plywood.

Cover & Conceal worked. Our building inspector — a curse on that profession which has never disclosed anything significant to me buying a house — never noticed a thing and pronounced the roof in good shape..

A fascinating footnote. We noticed the stucco outside the guest bedroom (where Vinny had to repair water & mold damage) and the adjacent cement block chimney had been covered with creepers. Remnants of the cat claw vine still hung to the stucco all the way to the roof like ivy on a ruined English castle. That flower bed, like the others, was irrigated by electronic sprinkler system. (When Shari set up our account at Tucson Water, she was told the property had been labeled high use.) Well, that creeper served as a freeway for the rodents to get on the roof and gnaw their way inside the living room walls.

Not a pretty sight even in a photo. The insulation and
the studs on this corner of the bedroom were covered
with black mold. Major wood rot around and under the
window. The corner on the other end of this same
wall has a corner stud three-quarters eaten out by
termites attracted by the moisture. (We had the termites
eradicated some years back.)

That was all covered up by Vinny's roof coat.

We don't know what was planted and watered by the flower bed on the east side outside the master bedroom. Cover & Conceal also had that dug out, but he never bothered to repair the damage to the window and inside the walls.

The good news is the heavy monsoon rains this year caused leaks in the living room, my office, and the master bedroom. That prompted us to work on the scuppers, parapets and roof. More importantly, we had the insides inspected by mold specialists who confirmed the problems. Even more importantly, the mold specialist was so long getting us his estimate, we hired Bear Down Builders (of tower remodel fame) to do the work.

Then we got the mold specialist's seven-page quote, complete with Biblical verse (Corinthians 12:9-10). Admittedly an upside bid, it was $12,000. Bear Downs' estimate was $2,000, although we expect we will go over. We are paying time and materials and we know and like the folks at Bear Down Builders. We want the work done.

The bedroom wall exposed. Nice and clean.

I cleaned up after the Bear Down Builders work pulling drywall nails and bits and pieces of wretched insulation. That would save them some time when the new drywall is installed and it gave Shari and me opportunity to get a close look. Shari donned lab coat, industrial face mask, and thick gloves to scrub mold and spray chlorine bleach over all exposed areas. We have had the rooms breathing and drying with fresh air.

I must say, having the walls exposed and cleaned, we are overwhelmingly grateful to have the work done.