Just noticed this no more than 5 min ago and am looking for some help on this. I was planning on hitting up the hardware store and grabbing some tape and plastic sheeting for a temporary fix until we can get a professional in here to look at it, but I'm wondering if there's anything else I can do.

EDIT: Just figured out it's probably an ice dam from what I've read, so I'll be doing a lot of shoveling, scraping, salting, and repeating for a while.

 

So in good news, I got calcium and put it up in my gutters and scraped some snow off. I have several inches of ice in my gutters unfortunately so I may need to get more.

Bad news: I just took down the blinds we had covering our living room windows and noticed it's not the windows, it's the actual house itself by that particular window. Crud.

 

When you are ready, give us location and house details and the board will advise on how to eliminate ice dams. Another bad possibility that often occurs is condensation in the attic space. So see if you can get a good look inside in the area where this leak is occurring.

Bud

 

We're in Pennsylvania, we got hit up with over 20 inches of snow in one day so we had a pretty good blizzard over here. We own a 1 1/2 story Cape Cod (about 68 years old now), but the area in question is actually an addition put on by the previous owner. The addition is only one story and is basically our living room.

 

Ice dams are caused by warm attics and a layer of snow. The snow acts as an insulator and melts from the warm roof. when that water drains to the edge of the roof/snow, it hits the cold air and freezes. As the ice edge builds, the water level rises behind it and eventually finds its way under your shingles. The heat under the roof can be from lack of ventillation, lack of insulation, or air leakage, or all three.

When you say you removed some of the snow, a common mistake is to remove 5 or 6 feet of snow, the easy to reach stuff. But mother nature answers back by building another dam where the snow ends, now farther up the roof and harder to reach. No need to call mother nature names, she already heard them from me.

Bud

 

Thanks for replying. Beer 4U2

Right now other than tossing calcium in my gutter (or rather, where it should be), chipping away the big chunks of ice when I can, and shoveling snow, is there anything else I can do? It's bubbling out some of the paint by the window and we have some towels underneath to catch the loose water and a heater running to try to dry up some of the water that got on the carpet but other than that I'm not sure what else we can do.

 

I had this happen at my old house about 20 years ago. All you can really do for now is try to remove as much of the snow from the roof as possible. If the roof doesnt have much of a pitch, you could shovel it. If its got too much pitch, you can get a roof snow rake that'll reach pretty far up the roof line and remove as much snow as you can. If your gonna chop the ice in the gutters, be careful as its real easy to damage the gutters (bang em up and put holes in them). I found this out the hard way.

As a long term solution, ventilation and good insulation in the attic is key. Additionally, what I wound up doing was removing about 6' of shingles along the edge of the roof and installing ice and water barrier. This is a waterproof membrane material that sticks to the roof decking. It seals the nail holes that penetrate it as well. It comes in 3' wide rolls. I wrapped the first course over the facia a couple inches (behind the gutters) and then ran it up the roof. Then ran a second course that overlapped the first by a couple inches. Then reinstall new shingles. Labor intensive, but not too expensive. Its a warm weather job though.