So, do Two Barn Farms postings allow updates to the downtown building too?

Anyhow, the roof issue is from ponding, where a flat roof isn’t so flat anymore and allows puddles to form.  While our roof has a slight slant to it, there are two good puddles on each side of the building, just shy of the roof edge.  During the winter, the water here froze and thawed, causing the roof membrane to leak.  It was a slow drip, and even though there is standing water, there isn’t much coming in right now.

Since Rick was done cutting fence pickets from the barn siding, I sent him to work on a new project, pulling down the original plaster ceiling in the back room, so we could see what was going on.

Well, it wasn’t the original ceiling, that one was another four feet up!  Rick managed to pull down two ceilings over the back room, in about 3 hours.  Then it dawned on me what the problem was.  All the roof rafters were level.  The roof was not.  Half of the room’s ceiling joists had another 1x board nailed to the side of it reaching up to the roof decking.  The last half of the room did not.  The decking isn’t even touching 5-6 joists.  That’s why it’s sagging!   So, the fix may be easy.  There are two joists that look like they have been quite wet.  We’ll have to see if they are still solid.  There is another one that is cracked.  From there, we need to extend these up to the proper level to hold the roof at a proper slope.

We have exposed a lot of brickwork.  There is some repair to be done of course, being from 1890-something.  We’ll have to do some tuckpointing, then we’ll coat everything with a surface bond anyway.  We plan on adding a false wall on the interior, just to add insulation, wiring, and provide a spot for nails.  We also measured out all the windows for replacement.
This should keep us busy for a few years.