Almost exactly 3 months ago, a massive tornado swept through St. Louis, narrowly missing our house…or so we thought.
Our house (a condo, technically–it’s part of a house with multiple residents) has a sloped roof with a few old chimneys (purely aesthetic). The slope is really important to this story, as you may wonder in a moment how we possibly didn’t notice anything.
A few weeks ago, I was up in our attic replacing a filter when I happened to notice that several support beams were completely broken. These are big pieces of wood, and they’re shattered.
So I reached out to the head of our HOA, who replied unsurprised, “It’s probably due to the chimney damage.” This was the first I knew of any chimney damage–I hadn’t seen anything. In fact, even after I took a look around the building from different angles, I couldn’t see anything.
Last week an architect dropped by to look at the attic. They went deeper into it than I had, and they found that the damage was extensive. He estimated that we would need to replace a significant portion of our roof, inside and out.
The architect left for a bit, and then he unexpected rang the doorbell to show me one more thing. “Did you know there’s a chimney cap on your roof?” he asked. He showed me a photo he had taken from a neighbor’s balcony that showed exactly what he described. From what we could tell, a large cap was wedged into the roof behind the remaining chimney.
That was quite a shock, but it gets much worse.
Today, a roofer visited our place and immediately scrambled onto the roof. When he got back down, he shared the following photo, which completely shocked me. I had no idea it was this bad (or that anyone had been on the roof to apply the tarp and even organize some of the bricks):
Can you imagine if this was on your house for the last 3 months and you had no idea? It’s surreal.
Despite all this, we’re incredibly fortunate–the tornado completely ripped off some roofs and destroyed quite a few houses. We’re very lucky. Just not as lucky as I thought.
Have you ever had an issue with your residence and you had no idea?
Wow!!! I’m so sorry. What a strange thing to learn about now–surreal seems like the right word. I hope the roofing work doesn’t impact you too much. Hugs!
Thanks! I work directly below the part that needs to be replaced, so whenever they’re able to replace the roof, it’s going to be quite loud for a bit. 🙂
Jamey,
I’m so sorry to hear that…and not knowing is even worse. I think that I shared with you (or possibly elsewhere) that my wife and I had been in our new home for around 60 days and while we out at a Christmas Eve party, I received a call from the local fire department informing me that the sprinkler system in the house had frozen, cracked, and gushed, in the end, 16K gallons of water into the 3rd, 2nd, and eventually ground floor. I lost about 190% of my game collection, along with 60% of my wife’s clothes and thousands of dollars in furniture. In the end, nine months and $260K in repairs later, we were back in the house.
I hope that the insurance company comes through an does the right thing.
Joe
You did mention that, Joe, and it’s devastating. I’m sorry you went through that ordeal.