More rain today, and heavy winds, that knocked over our arch in the front yard and destroyed a glass patio table in the backyard (the wind caught the umbrella). Nothing as bad as what’s going on around the Russian River, but the last few days have been a little reminder that while we’ve become very good at insulating ourselves from Mother Nature’s inconveniences, we’re still pretty helpless in the face of her more determined action.

Pictures from our Great Roof Adventure. Not exactly scintillating news, but at least this blog won’t leave any cookies or bugs on your computer….

This is what the exhaust pipe from the heater did to the roof. Notice how some of the wood looks like it’s been through a charcoal grill? That’s not a feature, it’s a bug.

Here’s a picture of the living room, with two fairly decent holes caused by water soaking through the attic floor and loosening the paint on the ceiling.

Yesterday we had the roofing guys out to put in a new ceiling- or more specifically, to replace the plywood where it had been damaged. Here, they’ve taken off the old plywood and put on the new, but you can still see some of the old wood.

A close-up of the oriented strand board. It’s not supposed to have that charred look.

The old roofing paper, arranged around the pipe. Notice the blackened edges where they had been closest to the pipe.

The Responsible Roofing guys lay down new sheets of paper while I walk around gingerly (in my sandals, no less) and for the thousandth time think about how incapable I would be of doing a job like this.

[To the tune of Talking Heads, “Burning Down The House,” from the album “Popular Favorites 1976-1992/Sand In the Vaseline“.]

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It’s really raining tonight. Heavy-duty, all-out, Charlotte Bronte-on-the-moors, Bulwer-Lytton level rain. Thank heavens the roof is fixed.

The roofing guys returned at 8 this morning, laden down with plywood, shingles, and other roof stuff. The house now sounds like it’s having a dentist’s appointment.

The latest from Sears can be bolied down to: if your insurance company wants to send its lawyer after us to recover the cost of negilent workmanship, we’ll talk. Until then, go away.

My wife spent some of yesterday- while on hold with various Sears people- reading message board posts about bad Sears service experiences. From what we can tell, the company has now become so big, different parts of it no longer know anything about what the other parts do and don’t do.

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So the roofing guys showed up this morning, bright and early. I was lying on the couch, trying (not very hard) to wake up, while my son sat on my chest watching Clifford the Big Red Dog, when the doorbell rang. A few minutes later, they were up on the roof, looking around; a few minutes later, I started hearing various hammering noises, so I figured things were moving in a positive direction.

The roofing guys we have (Responsible Roofing) are very good, and they soon figured out where the leak was coming from. Not the solar attic fan, which I had suspected. Not some other random place. No, the water was leaking in through the plywood that had burned away because the heater exhaust had been improperly installed.

Technorati Tags: business, menlo park

When we moved into the house in 2001, we found that the existing heater system dated from roughly the dawn of the Space Race, and used technology that looked like something from a crash site at China Lake. We bought a new heater from Sears, party because of the whole Kenmore thing, and partly because we’d heard good things about their installation and customer service.

Boy, were we wrong.

The problems began when Sears subcontracted the installation to a company that had hired refugees from that Stalin-era ape-man project. They were, shall we say, incompetent, as we began to suspect when they punched a large, unnecessary hole in the wall of our laundry room to try to go get a heating duct there. (There’s no attic above the laundry room, hence the confusion.) This sense was reinforced when we noticed that whenever the heater was turned on, the fuse box started to spark.

This year, one of the ducts fell off, and had to be replaced (by different guys).

Now, we’ve got this: the exhaust turns out not to have been properly insulated, so it’s just been sitting against the plywood on the roof, heating up said roof. (The roofing guy brought down some charred pieces of plywood for proof.) It’s not an exaggeration to say that it could have burned down the house.

So now we go back to Sears. After a full day on the phone, countless calls, and many brain cells spent trying to build a model of the Sears bureaucracy, we’ve come to the following understanding:

1. Sears won’t take the roofing company’s word that the damage was caused by the exhaust. They want to send out their own guys, who will diagnose the problem.
2. Those guys they want to send out say they don’t do that kind of work. They don’t know who in Sears does.
3. According to one person on the phone, the heater guys don’t do roofs, so the heater guys couldn’t have had anything to do with anything that went wrong with the roof.
4. But all this may be moot, because Sears may take the position that after a year it’s not liable for damages caused by its installation, no matter how incompetently or dangerously it was done.

Seen from the outside, my best guess is that the fundamental problem is that the Sears service bureaucracy is now large enough so that two things are happening:

1. Parts of it are now able to make changes that affect the entire system, but without all the parties who are affected by those changes necessarily knowing about them- until a hapless customer discovers that Office B doesn’t do what Office A says it should, and can’t move forward without.
2. The system is far too complex to be accessible to outsiders, that is, customers. Now, if this were a medical bureaucracy- a hospital or an HMO- and I had a long-term disease, it would make sense for me to invest the time necessary to become a kung fu master of their internal processes. If my life’s on the line, I can collect names and figure out workflows. But for a heater? The return is much more marginal.

What they really need is something closer to a case officer system, where someone on the inside is assigned to help customers deal with their problem from start to finish.

Meanwhile we’ve got the heat turned off. It’s only in the 50s tonight, and we’ve got plenty of fleece vests and heavy blankets, so it’s not the worst thing.

But it’ll be interesting to see what tomorrow brings. I hope this ultimately has a happy ending that doesn’t involve me writing several checks with an uncomfortable number of zeroes at the end of them, but we can’t rule that out at this point. And more rain is coming, so the roof must be fixed.

To get away from the many things breaking in our house, yesterday we retreated to the garage, and spent the afternoon building storage units that we bought at Ikea recently. My son was especially into it.

We’re going to send them to child care tomorrow, and my wife and I are going to finish the project. Then I’m going to throw out about 80% of what I own that isn’t books. Who should need so much storage space?