Background
I live in a townhouse condo. (ie: I, along with the mortgage company, own the inside and the condo corporation owns the outside.) A few years ago the condo corp determined that the siding on the condos was getting old and needed replacement. So we had this big siding project.
The siding project took forever and could be a series of blog posts on its own. But that's not this story. There were lots of problems with the siding project. A one year project turned into two. When they started the project they found a lot of rot underneath the old siding. And a number of units had rotting rim joists behind the back steps. This required workers to come in, put support stands in the basement to keep the house from falling apart when the old rim joist was replaced/repaired.
Sure enough, my house had a rotting rim joist. I have a finished basement with drywall ceiling (why?! Why would you ever put drywall ceiling in a basement?!). They didn't have to tear out the drywall, thankfully. But they did put up their supports in my basement to do the joist work. They also found a lot of rot on the wall of one of my bedrooms which caused them to have to rebuild the whole wall. (Turns out there was a lot of problems with that wall too, but that's another story.) So, they ended up doing a lot of work on my unit.
Something's Amiss in the Ceiling
During the siding project One day I went down to the basement and noticed a slight discolouration on the basement ceiling. "Has that always been there and I've just never noticed?" I wondered. There are a few places in my house where the ceiling has discolourations, largely due to bad paint jobs. They're not moist. They're hard. They've always been there. They haven't changed in years. Was this just one of those? Was this a left over mark from when they had to support my house with the rim joist work?
I came down again a few days later, and it had grown.....I think?
Not too far from that spot is a hole in the drywall where there's a valve for a water pipe for the backyard hose. One day I was sitting at my desk in the basement and I heard a rapid "tck tck tck pshhh". Water was dripping out of that hole onto a cardboard box.
Ohh crud. "Where is that water coming from!?" My strategy of ignoring the situation and hoping it would go away wasn't working very well.
I called a friend to come over and to take a look to see if he could figure out what's going on. It was the middle of the winter. He happened to notice that when my furnace came on, nothing was coming out of the exhaust pipe in the back of the house. The exhaust pipe looks like an elongated S. It comes out of the back of the house, turns up 90 degrees for about a foot and a half, then 90 degrees again away from the house. Except this time instead of turning up after coming out of the house, it turned down.
Back to the basement. A line of drywall, starting from that initial spot to the backwall was now soft. There are parts I could just put my hand through. I tore a lot of that drywall out. Behind that drywall was the furnace exhaust pipe. It was wet. "What's going on?"
I had a protection plan for my furnace where I paid every month so that certain repairs and an annual service are covered. I called the company. They sent someone out. He arrived at 10:00pm on a Monday night. He took a look. He poked his head up into the ceiling.
"Ahhhh, I see what's going on. Somehow the exhaust pipe broke just this side of the furnace room. Now, when the furnace comes on, it's blowing exhaust into the ceiling area, which is warming up the exhaust pipe — which is bringing in cold air from the outside. So the pipe is getting cold, and that's causing condensation around the pipe, which is dripping onto your ceiling.
"Now here's the thing. It's blowing exhaust fumes into your basement. I'm getting really low carbon monoxide readings, but you want lower. So we either have to fix this up tonight, or I have to shut this furnace down until you get it fixed."
It was about -20 out and getting colder. So I said we should do it tonight. (And by "we" I mean "he".)
It took two or three hours. He had to cut out more drywall to get to where the break happened. He fixed it. He told me "This isn't really covered under your plan, but it looks like you've got a big, expensive job ahead of you....so I'm just going to say I did work that was covered."
"Thank you thank you thank you thank you!!!!"
I did whatever clean up I can. I got some mold killer. I sanded down areas with obvious water damage. Then I continued to procrastinate doing something about this. This is way beyond my skills as a home owner.
A Puddle on the Floor
Then one morning I came down to the basement and the floor underneath the pipe was wet! "What is going on?!" I checked the exhaust pipe. It was working as expected. It wasn't wet. None of the left-over drywall ceiling was moist. I had a plastic cover on the floor, and it was wet underneath that.
I called the condo corp to ask for them to send somebody out. I really had to wonder if these issues are caused by the siding project. (There had been a number of issues which lead me to wonder, a few of which I'll get to in a minute.)
They sent someone out. They took a look around. The broken exhaust pipe was likely a coincidence since it broke pretty far from the outer wall. But this puddle.....
What was happening was that in the course of a few cold spells and thaws, ice had built up right by the rim joist. Somehow the insulation that should have been there had been brought out away from the rim joist, which allowed that area to get cold. Moisture got in, froze, then thawed. When it thawed, in dripped down the foundation wall behind the drywall, and came out onto the floor below.
The eavestroughs (part of the siding project) had been hung horizontally. Eavestroughs should be hung at an angle so that water flows down towards a downspout and out away from the house. But these were horizontal. This caused melting ice to collect, overflow, and drip down the side of the house. This dripping was happening right above the furnace exhaust pipe. The furnace exhaust pipe was shoddily sealed with tape. When they guy from the condo corp looked at it, he said "I can see right through that. And if I can see through it, water can get in."
To recap: we had the perfect storm: Water was overflowing from horizontal eavestroughs and dripping down right where there was an opening into the house, right at a point where there was no insulation to keep that area warm. At least two of these problems was the fault of the siding company. (The insulation part wasn't their fault.)
I was told that neither the condo corp, nor siding company was responsible for damaged finished basements. "We don't fix basements." I thought that was ridiculous. If a roofing company negligently threw old shingles off of a roof onto a parking lot and damaged cars, it wouldn't matter that they're not a car-fixing company. Their actions would have caused the damage, and they'd be found negligent. Same thing here. If the eavestroughs had been hung properly, that water wouldn't have dripped down the side of the house right at the point where there was an opening. If the exhaust pipe had been sealed up properly, then water wouldn't have been able to get into the house from outside.
I told my story to a lawyer friend and he just kinda said something to the effect of "Yeah, that sort of thing is really hard to fight." It sounded like I'd spend more in legal fees than it would cost to fix.
So I spent the next few months procrastinating doing anything to fix this situation. I had a huge, ugly hole in my basement ceiling, and a big section of drywall beisde the hole with some insulation held in by a clear, plastic sheet. This caused the basement to be somewhat drafty and more uncomfortable than usual. And I didn't want to start doing repairs until I went through a season of snow and meltage to make sure the problem was fixed.
This story will continue in a future post: My Basement - Part 2.
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