The Honest Courtesan

I was born and raised in a very wet climate, so I’m used to it; I lived in a drier one for almost a decade, and eventually decided I did not care for it, so here I am living in an extremely damp one again.  What that means is, while people in much of the world are concerned with conserving water, our problem is a surfeit of water.  And that means I’ve had to spend a great deal of time and effort, and more than a little money, on structures and measures designed to keep water out of places I don’t want it to be.  There was a drip in the new bathroom which took me a year to finally stop, and of course I just finished fixing a leak in one of the hot tub seals, but I still can’t figure out what’s causing the persistent leak on the north porch every time it rains.  I took off a ceiling panel so I could get in there, installed a new flashing with plenty of rubber sealant, and used several cans of expando-foam to close up the gap between the metal roofing ad the shingles of Chekhov’s cottage roof, and though most of the problem seems to have been solved from above, there’s still a drip below that I just can’t track down.  I guess it isn’t really important; it’s on the porch rather than inside the walls, and it’s nothing like it was.  But it still makes me crazy that try as I might, I just can’t see where the damned water is coming from.  Worse come to worst, I’m just going to slather a lot of Durabak over the area when I’m waterproofing several other things this summer; with any luck that’ll also solve the intermittent problem in the walkway behind the tub.