The Worst Water Leak I've Ever Seen in Our Building's Roof!

Donnie, what are you doing? Alright folks, apparently we have a leak and it's like it's not a good one. It's about the worst leak I've ever seen actually. Somebody sent us a video of it. So this middle building here has a really bad leak inside right on the front. So we're going to go upstairs and see it, but first I guess we'll show you the video. What was sent to us by the tenant. Now this is not for the squeamish. If you don't like seeing horror films. Yeah, don't look. Don't look. Hey, I made a new one for anybody. If I fall, grab me. Okay, so what do you think the problem is going to be Donnie? Hopefully it's obvious. I think it's going to be obvious. That much water? I think the flashing, look there's some flashing on the ground right here. I think the flashing has rolled back. Donnie mentioned he thinks maybe it made a funnel. I think he's probably right. It rolled back and somehow the water is going straight down and it's just funneling it. That ain't it? What's the problem? I can't see. Oh no, that means it's backing up. That don't help. On the left side ain't it? Yeah, it was on the Cali side. Left side from where you're looking. Alright, so he's right about where the leak is. Basically the flashing there, we didn't put that flashing on. They only ran it down like seven, eight inches, six inches. We did one ourselves and we ran that crap down a foot and a half because the problem you get is if it rains really hard, especially if it's coming from this direction on a relatively flat roof like this, it's all wavy too because it's an old building. This building's over 100 years old. What? Yeah, so if the rain is coming this way, it'll hit that metal and actually just skip up or you saw how severe that was, probably what's happening is it's ponding over there somewhere and the ponding is allowing it to the level of the water to rise and then it just pours in the lowest spot which at the front of that building where the wood hits the front of the building, the front's brick, there's a crack all the way across. That's just how it's built. We usually don't have, this is the first problem we've had out of that front flashing but let's see what Donnie wants to do. I think the fix is going to be, we're going to go get some silicone and I'm going to fill up that crevice all the way across there or some spray foam or something, whatever we got over there and we're going to fill that crevice up, no water can. Do you think it's pooling or do you think, it doesn't look like there's enough of a dip for it to pool. I think the wind's blowing it back up. You think it's just because of the direction of the rain? Well, there's too many sticks up underneath there, why is the sticks under there? Yeah. It don't make no sense if the wind ain't blowing that way, there shouldn't be no sticks under there. Yeah. So, something is blowing it up. Yeah. It must be rain, I mean the water must be blowing north. This, we've done a lot on this roof, we've actually done a lot of videos on this roof, fixing it. Donnie and Joey. Look at that. Repaired a lot of it. We had a lot of problems again with it. We had to go back through and re-tape it and re-do it all. Yeah, I'm surprised she hasn't said anything about that. Well, it probably wasn't leaking there. That's where it overlaps, isn't it? Yeah, we just did it through. But you can see how in the front, they only put like a six or seven inch little trail there on the front. You need to do more than that, like it just needs to come down farther, so that if the water does go under it, it can only go up a couple inches, you know, and then it won't actually encroach on anything. That would probably be fine if we were steeper, we're pretty flat up here. Yeah, so it's not, I don't know what the pitch is, but it ain't much. Yeah, maybe four inches and 16 foot, something like that. And up there, it's probably less because it's in the middle. I don't know if it's that bad, but it's, well, we can tell by this. So this pops up six inches, seven inches, that's about seven inches. That's going to be 14 feet? Six of them over 70 foot. It's less than one inch a foot, you know, much less than one inch, it's half an inch a foot. So it's just, there's not enough drop on it. You can do a metal roof, you just got to get it just right. And you can't have, whenever we do it too, whenever we overlap the metal, we go two feet. So if this bottom piece was two feet up, no matter how much rain you got hitting that crevice there, it would never go two feet uphill and then come in. Yeah, that's the idea behind it. And then we screw it right on top. Yeah, right on top of the seam. Yeah, people don't like that. Yeah, they want it screwed in. Yeah, people differ on that. I've heard overseas, everybody does it in the seam in the United States. It's warrantied to do it in the flats. We didn't actually do this. There was already nails in it. We took the nails out and put screws on it. Yeah, yeah. And the warranty, in my opinion, is just a joke because, I mean, they're not going to warranty any damage or even installation costs. I mean, it's like warranty is useless on a metal roof unless you had somebody install it, of course. Okay, so yeah, we're going to figure out a way to fill that up and see what's going on. And we need to confirm from the video which side it was just so we know for sure. So we rewatched the video and it's actually the right side. So it was right where all those sticks and stuff were. So there's more of a crevice there. So we're going to try to fill it up with silicone. Now, I know what you're thinking, that's not going to be watertight. Well, it's going to be wind blowing crap around and making a big mess tight. So we think it'll help. And silicone is watertight, but if you get it perfect, but we're probably not going to get it perfect. I'm doing this. Donnie says he's perfect. It's not too hot today. It's like 91, but this roof is cooking. Don't touch the roof, Donnie. Make sure you levitate. Remember all those comments, Donnie, when they say you don't do anything? Yeah. They're all sitting on their couch or the toilet. That's what you got to look forward to. All right. So we're going to go across and do a little bit of that and we'll come back. He's basically focusing on the middle building there. There's three buildings here with the same roof. Three entrances with the same roof. This was the old, you see the old bank there behind them. This building, first one over there, the farthest one from us, this building over the farthest away from us, this one, this third of the building was the post office way back in the day. In the 1950s, it was the post office. The original post office was actually in the bank building across the street. And then when that was the post office, these two buildings over here were a meat market. All right, y'all. I'm up here. Ronnie's over there. You see what I've done here? Basically sealed up all them crevices all the way across the top of this building. That's where I think the water was backing up and going up under there. The rest of it looks pretty good here. That's the only spot that I can see. Could have been having problems. So we're going to call it and get off this roof. It's hot and it's time to go. So, all right, folks, we're going to show you something about these bricks in the middle of this video because we talk about this a lot. This is a really old building. Like we mentioned, this thing is, we think from like 1906, it's like 120 years old. It might even be a little older than that. We're not sure. If you go back in the deeds far enough, you can't really tell what happened. But these are softer bricks. The bricks that are that old before, like the 1930s or so are softer. And you see how some of them are broken out. We've got problems with this building where these, I think they call it spalling. Basically the way these were originally designed where it was, the bricks were softer because they weren't kiln dried. They were dried like in the sun. They literally just form them out in the sun. And they had this mortar that was lime based mortar. So the mortar is softer. So what happens is when the brick gets wet, it swells a little bit because it's a softer brick. And when it does, the mortar gives way a little bit. So as the brick swells, the mortar gives way a little bit because the mortar is soft because it's not hard mortar with Portland cement in it, like our modern mortar is. So the problem is if you take one of these old buildings, the mortar will disintegrate and people will go back and point it back in, which I think they may have done here. Can you tell Donnie? If that's original style mortar? It's gray, but I can't tell if that's... It looks a little eroded. Yeah, maybe it's some of the old stuff. If you put the modern mortar in here, you will make all of the bricks or a lot of the bricks break apart like this. Because what happens is if you put hard mortar, when the brick gets wet because it's soft, it will swell a little bit. And since the mortar is hard, the mortar will not give and the brick will break. And it's just a common thing with old buildings. So if you get an old building like this and if you have to repoint the mortar, you really need to use the old style mortar or at least something without a bunch of Portland cement in it. So it's a real problem. But anyway, we just figured we'd show it here since this building, the bricks are in pretty bad condition. There's just holes all over the place. You can see where there's like half bricks missing just from sitting here. So what do you think Donnie? It is really hot today, but we're in the shade. That's good. Hey Donnie, you know what? Yep. With the grass growing in the middle of the street, kind of reminds me of how it must have been back in 1890. Yep, that's about right. They've been working on the water lines for a while and whenever they pulled up the pavement, they actually got grass growing back. That's actually going to be repaved pretty soon. Hopefully. Yeah, but when you get done with your work area, clean it up. Yeah, you got to clean it up a little bit, you know. Make everybody feel like you actually done something. Ain't that the truth. But y'all, hopefully that fixes it. And we'll put a bunch of silicone up and it should it should block it from running back up underneath there. That's what I think it's doing. I think it's blowing around going backwards. So if you like what you see, give us a thumbs up for filming it. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and we'll catch you on the next one.