While we welcome the plentiful rain this year as some respite from our years long drought in California (and especially in Santa Barbara), we are happy to say that the last few weeks has given us mostly a break from rain, allowing the plywood on our decks and exterior stairs to dry out so that they can be waterproofed.

Here is the deck outside the 2nd floor office, and attached to the outside stairs, after all the  rain.

The wood was seriously wet and needed weeks to dry out.  I am happy to say that the waterproofing work is almost done.  Here are the four outside decks on our second floor.

The water proofing process is actually quite involved.  It started with the plumbers installing a drain.  The drain is attached to a piece of flashing such that the drain to the flashing is seamless.  Then the roofers install flashing all around the edges.  This is pretty intricate work; check out the flashing on our outside stairs.

They then put some kind of coating on the flashing.  I’m not sure what this is for.

Then they put some sticky tar paper from edge to edge covering all the wood.  (Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of this step.)  After that they float a liquid sealant across the entire area and up the sides of the flashing.

In the above picture, you can also see some lines in the coating.  For this deck, with two drains, they used some angled cut sticks as guides and then floated some plaster of some sort on the back of the deck to create a directed flow into the two drains towards the back.  The final step is the sand, added to the wet coating, which adds a good surface for the tile mud to attach to.

In addition to the decks, the roofers are also handling the water proofing of the doorways.  For example, here is the large 6-panel pocket door that is at the rear of the first floor of our house.

Even if water were to get in that area, despite the covered porch outside of it, it would have nowhere to get into the structure below.  Here is the doorway to the office on the second floor.

That ties in to the water proofing on the deck, so there is continuous protection all the way into the building.  In some cases, the flashing actually goes wraps over the edge and ties in with other waterproofing, as you can see here outside our first floor, where it goes down beyond where the concrete slab will be and ties into the foundation wall water proofing.

I guess the point is, water proofing is serious stuff and needs to be done right.