Rainy Days

Wales was interesting. As soon as one crosses the Severn Bridge, one hits miserable rain. Apparently it's often like that.

I can't imagine living in that kind of climate. I'm sure the lack of sunshine would eventually get to me, as would any kind of clammy humidty. But more than anything else ... rain and a wet climate makes me think of rotting wood and home destruction. The only way I could live in a place like that would be to have my "ideal" home:

• Built on concrete pillars, 4 to 6 feet off the surrounding ground
• The entire structural frame of the house built of steel and concrete
• The root made of cast concrete, with a slope such that absolutely no water would pool
• The eaves would overhang the walls by 4 to 6

Do you see the theme of that? No opportunity for water to seep into things and rot the underlying wood.

When I was younger our house had many such leaks. The house was literally rotting around us, but we didn't have the money to fix it. It created a deep impression on me. To this day I would much rather spend money on things like roofs and caulking than on other things like electronics or carpeting.

During a particularly strong thunderstorm here in Tucson a few months back, I noticed a drip on the inside of one of the windows. You can't imagine how much that bothered me. It meant that water was getting inside the framing of the house. Where the leak was I have no idea. That's one of the problems with tile roofs -- the purpose of the tile is not to be the complete weather barrier, but rather to sheet off most of the water. There's a tar-paper layer under it that's supposed to be the weather barrier. But if that has a leak somewhere there's almost no way to figure out where it is, short of taking up the whole tile roof.

Subsequent rains yielded no drips from the window, so I'm going to assume that it was some weird case of water being blown into a crevice somewhere. Normal rains would not produce that ... that's my hope.

The other thing about Arizona -- aside from there being relatively little rain -- is that the humidity is so low any water that does get into the framing probably dries out long before any persistent moisture can accumulate. Rot comes from the wood being wet for a sustained period of time, not necessarily from it simply being wet.