“Um, Guys? Our Skylight Fell Off.”
A Harrowing Tale of Homeownership, Survival and Married Life
It was good that we were gone when it happened.
It was good that we were not home when it came loose, slid down the icy roof, and crash-landed on our porch, right in front of our door. That thing was heavy. It had sharp edges. We could have died, you guys.
It just so happened that we had been out for a night of debauchery (and by debauchery, I mean we picked Micah’s dad up from the airport and he took us out to dinner at Famous Dave’s), and thus, we were providentially spared. There is apparently more for us to do here in this world.
We had ventured out amidst an ice storm that had turned into a snow storm. My dad-in-law felt apologetic that we had had to leave the house in such weather. Little did he know …
We came home that night (entering through the garage like always), bellies full of food and arms heavy-laden with the spoils of our carousing (and by “spoils of our carousing”, I mean a Styrofoam box of cold french fries and bbq wings), ready to get to bed early so that Micah could take dad back to the airport for a 6 am flight the next morning.
I went to put NJ to bed. The house felt more-than-usually cold, and there was a sound of heavy wind, but we live right by the Columbia Gorge and wind has become so common-place to our life that it never occurred to me to think, “Gee — I wonder if our skylight fell of?” just because of a little breeze.
I started to walk down the stairs. Our skylight is situated just above these stairs. I looked up, saw the hole, and thought:
“Now there’s a clean window.”
I won’t humiliate myself by telling you how long I stood there like a moron, admiring the pristine state of our skylight and wondering how it had come to be so clean since I had certainly never cleaned it, before the thought dawned on me that it was very cold and breezy, just here under the skylight.
“Honey? I think our skylight fell off.”
We just bought our house last summer. This was not good news.
Sure enough, we opened the front door and there it was, sitting on our front porch. Luckily, the pane had not shattered.
I wanted to go to bed. We all wanted to go to bed, not least Micah and dad, who had to get up at 4:30 the next morning. But we couldn’t exactly leave a gaping hole in our house in the middle of a snow storm.
Several ideas were proposed. At one point we thought that we could cover it with some plywood and even went out and bought a piece at the good old Depot of Home, but it became clear soon enough that that wasn’t going to work. In the end, it turned out that really the easiest, most reasonable thing to do was just to put the dang thing back on. In. The middle. Of a snow storm.
My dad-in-law, a good sport and also an engineer, pitched in to help, but it fell to Micah to be the one to climb up onto the roof, which was by now crusted over with multiple layers of ice, followed by a fresh layer of snow. Snow pants would have compromised his traction, so he elected to work with his knees embedded in ice and snow for oh, about an hour. His field is risk analysis, and, having weighed the risk of frostbite against the risk of breaking his neck, he chose to cast his lot with frostbite.
The first problem to solve was how to get the skylight from the ground to the roof. Considering it weighs about as much as an ill-fed grown man, carrying it up the ladder did not seem like a wise idea. It was too heavy for Micah to safely pull it up from the roof, even if someone handed it up to him. So, it would have to go up from the inside.
I mentioned that the skylight is over our stairs. The ceiling is very high at this point, high enough to need a pretty tall ladder. It’s also pretty hard to use a ladder when you have stairs directly beneath whatever you are trying to get to. If you think about it, you will see why. We do have one of those nifty ladders where you can adjust the two legs separately, but … Micah was using it.
Here’s what we ended up doing: Micah’s dad and I made a sort of cradle for the skylight out of some nylon rope, threw the other end of the rope up to Micah, then I ran outside real quick, and he threw the end of the rope to me. With a heave-ho, I pulled on the rope like prisoner 24601 in the beginning scene of Les Mis, and thus, the skylight rose majestically up to the hole from whence it came. Micah pulled the skylight and I pulled the rope and we got the dang thing back on the roof.
As it turns out, the deadbeats who installed it in the first place forgot to screw it in, so it had been sitting there, nothing holding it but a bead of caulk, waiting, like ripening fruit, for the first ice/snow storm to pluck it off of our roof. Obviously, they hadn’t watched as much “This Old House” as we have.
What’s the moral of this story? Well, there are many.
- Your home inspection company is always, always, always going to miss something. They are not the gods we make them out to be.
- If your skylight is clean, it might be gone.
- No, you can’t lose your knees to frostbite.
- Skylights are heavy, man. They just are.
- Caulk is not glue. Say it with me: caulk is not glue. Put some dang screws in it, you guys. It would’ve taken you like 4 extra minutes to do it right, in the summer, with proper equipment.
- When disaster strikes, you can come together, or you can fall apart. I feel like someone already said that? I can’t have just made that up myself.
This is the skylight incident that I eluded to here. I share it by popular demand. Thanks for reading! If you want to read more, click the link below to follow my new publication!
