the further adventures of shop repair

I finished re-caulking the two windows in the big bay area of the shop last Friday, inside and out, the work I had started on the previous Wednesday until it started to rain. While I was working on the outside I could see that all the old caulking around the frame of the windows is dried out and cracked. Will need to re-do that as well. I just wonder if I really need to scrape out all the old stuff or if I can just go over it with new stuff. Since I had the 8' ladder out I checked out the top of the walls where they meet the 3” or 4” overhang of the roof. I hesitate to call it an eave. Some of the metal is rusty on the surface but some of it is so rusty that the metal is flaking off. Not sure how I need to approach that. Besides that, there are stretches of about 6” - 8” where the wall has pulled away underneath the overhang. I'm thinking that that's where the water leaks in. I'm not sure the limited kinds of caulk available at our small town hardware store will be up to the job. The guy there did mention some tar like stuff in a can. I may have to check that out.

Yesterday, I got the 8' ladder and peered at where the wall meets the roof on the inside where it leaks, which is not an easy thing since there's a sort of ledge there at the very top which is all rusty and corroding and I saw a hole! So obviously, it's not the outside section on the wall, it's the actual roof. So then I got the 12' ladder out and looked at the roof where the hole I saw from the inside was. No hole that I could see, but what I did see was that the edge of the metal roof panels have corroded away in varying degrees where they end in the shallow channel on the top of the overhang. There is a notch where the water is supposed to drain out but it was all clogged with rust so the water slips under the corroded ends of the roof panels and into the inside. Confused yet? I didn't have my camera with me on that 12' ladder so you will just have to use your imagination.

Here's a cross section:

Since my idea of patching the hole with a piece of sheet metal and silicone wasn't going to work, what I did was scrape away as much of the rust as I could and cleaned it as best I could while perched on the 12' ladder and then I filled in all the gaps with silicone where the roof panels had corroded away. Actually, I did four of the 16” sections. So, we'll see. It's suppose to rain today and Monday. I doubt it will work as a permanent solution as there is no way to tell if the silicone sealed against all that rust. I may be investigating that tar.

Oh, and the toilet is still leaking. Well, the floor was wet and there is some question as to whether it is leaking from the toilet or the valve that comes out of the wall.

In the meantime, I am still waiting on two deposit checks. I thought these people were in a hurry.

I'm driving in to the city later today to stay at my daughter's house while she and her husband spend a couple of days away with her husband's brother and his wife. I'll be the cook and chauffeur, fixing dinner and ferrying the kids to and from school and the boy to his job.