In Which Paint Fails and The Breezeway Roof Is Implicated

 When the house was repainted, one of the big issues was the cedar siding. As mentioned before, the oils and water absorption of the natural siding can cause the paint to bubble and fail. In the case of the area around the breezeway, we noticed really severe bubbling during the rainy winter month on the garage wall underneath the breezeway. When punctured with a knife, a substantial amount of yellow tinged water poured out. Not good. That meant water was getting behind the paint. 

I narrowed down the most likely point of ingress to be the seam between the breezeway roof and flashing and the garage wall. The previous owners had applied a substantial amount of caulk to the flashing and wall, so my suspicion was that the leak was underneath the flashing, but that didn't make a whole lot of sense. I really hoped the roof wasn't leaking water down the inside of the siding!

Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture, the situation got progressively worse as the winter progressed. The failing paint seemed to originate from where the gutter met the wall. Following a hunch, I removed the inch or so of caulking surrounding the gutter cap and realized that the gutter cap wasn't sealed and that the siding was never painted where the gutter met the wall. To make matters worse, the gap between the wall and the gutter was caulked, creating a watertight seal with the siding. No paint plus constant water pooling meant that the water just ran down the wall until it reached the paintline, then it spread horizontally, as far as the failing paint would allow. As the water caused more paint to fail, the horizontal and vertical spread of the "water balloon" increased. As a quick fix, I cut open the seal between the siding and the gutter, hoping that the siding hadn't been too damaged.

At some point, while I had the ladder out, I started poking the center beam that run between the house and garage and discovered that the beam was soaking wet under the paint. Yikes! I looked at the roof over the beam and discovered that the corrugated plastic material had multiple cracks where it was screwed into the wood supports. The cracks were, in turn, letting water run along the top of the beam and had started to rot the beam as well. The paint was completely compromised, but the rot wasn't too bad so my plan of attack was to strip away the paint on the siding and beam, stabilize any rot, replace the plastic roofing, and replace the gutters. It really shouldn't bee that hard. The only question was how bad was the damage to the siding? It felt sound when probed, so I hoped i would get lucky and not have to reside the garage.

Turns out the siding was solid. Too bad the rest of it didn't go quite so smoothly...