The War Against the Ice-Dams

On those days before Christmas when it was raining, how often did I thankfully say, "At least we don't have to shovel it"?

Well, maybe that didn't turn out as well as I'd thought at the time.

So it turns out that the pre-Christmas rain, snow, slush, goo, froze into several inches of packed snow and ice on the roof and in the gutters. A week later when it snowed, I could roof-rake the new snow down. But not those inches of ice. Underneath the snow-ice were, in places, several inches of solid ice, just threatening to be ice-dams with the first thaw, diverting thawed snow into the attic instead of having it drip into the gutters or off the roof.

So it had to go.

Except on days I had to be at "work" [ha ha ha ... the place where I go to rest up] I spent hours daily on the ladder, with a hoe, hacking off small slices of snowpack, trying desperately to be gentle enough to Not Touch The Shingles while being vicious enough to crack the ice that needed to come down.

I'm trying to think of a part of my body that didn't ache from the work.  Not figurin' it out...


BUT you can see the results over the front door: several feet of roof that had been cleared and then sat in the sun for a couple of days.  Woo hoo!!!


And yesterday, with the warm weather, no ice dams!  No icicles!  (Now we just hope that the clean-up efforts didn't cause a different set of roof problems.)