Upon returning from Belize, we discovered a cherry tree laying across our back porch roof. All things considered, it could have been worse – but having a tree fall on your house is still not fun.
Our neighbor said he herd what sounded like a “9 foot big-foot running through the woods” the day we returned from our trip – we initially didn’t see the tree because we arrived at night, hit the hay as soon as we returned, and it was located on the back of the house where we couldn’t easily see it.
In the morning I sat down at the computer and saw limbs propped against the screened porch and thought “oh no” and then i looked up and saw the split roof structure. Amazingly, the skylight seemed fine.
This double joist, however, was not fine.
The roof is supposed to be a triangle.
Look how close this was to hitting the main structure of the house.
As I was taking photos of this wider view, I noticed a suspicious mist floating by down in our front yard.
I have no idea how long this had been going on for, a small section of the lawn between the pipe and road was a soggy mess. I like how Spencer tired to makeshift divert the water.
Yay for county water guy! We called the county, because our shutoff was in a hole next to the pipe and was folded – we didn’t have the experience to know what to feel around for with the shut off bar tool thing. That is our shut off tool, and we did know where it was located in our garage in case of emergency.
He got it shut off and pumped the water out of the access hole for us.
We were concerned about this black pipe – but it turns out it was just a random scrap sitting in there.
After that immediate fiasco was addressed, I went upstairs to check out the tree on the roof again. From this perspective the skylight still looks good. So our next task is to get the tree off of the house and fix the structure.
Back to the burst pipe: this was the piece that failed – specifically, the threaded area had rusted out – but the freezing temperatures probably helped the process along a little bit.
We simply just replaced the entire faucet because the location is very useful for watering the lawn. (The fixture just screwed on to the pipe). The pipe itself is a concern because it is just galvanized and will eventually rust and fail.
When our neighbors moved in, a mowing service person hit their pipe and broke it off. They ended up eliminating it all together – but it cost them $600. Actually, I have never seen pipes like these out in lawns and sticking so far out of the ground before. There is no way to keep the water out of the pipe in freezing temperatures – but Georgia usually doesn’t have sustained amounts of cold like more northern states have, so I suppose it isn’t too much of a concern. Again, we’ll just keep ours and see how it goes.
It is kind of crazy how we had two house things happen back to back! I’m just happy we were home when the pipe burst!