Ah, SUNSHINE!

"I can see clearly now, the rain is gone..."

Friday, in the rain, Danny & I went to the RV shop and bought their only roll of Eternabond. The scary thing about having repairs to do on labor day weekend is what if you need materials and you can't get them. But they did have Eternabond so I breathed a bit easier. Saturday dawned clear with a light breeze, perfect for this sort of work. I pulled the big blue tarp off the motorhome and pulled it into the sunny part of the yard. Pulled a tall stepladder alongside and started investigating. Along the drivers side of the roof, there were a few places where the rubber roof was cut - ripped - broken at the corner. The roof had a coating, and there were patches under the coating - not solidly glued down and apparently no longer effective. I pulled all that goop off the edge and found C-shaped cuts in the rubber roof membrane along the edge of the roof. I wish I'd thought to take pictures. I didn't. Blogging was far from my mind; I was pretty focused on tracking down leaks. When I had removed all the junk, I could see that we needed to repair from the high point of the cabover all the way down to over the bathroom. I cleaned the area, Danny removed the molding from the side, and we cut Eternabond to fit. Then we did the same at the rear, where I had crunched it, and replaced our duct-tape patch on the sidewall with Eternabond while we were at it.
The Eternabond was easy to apply and should take care of the problem. I checked the whole roof and could not find any other apparent source for the recent deluge. Clouds came through just as we were finishing up, and we thought it might get a test, but they passed on through with no rain. The repair looks good - we'll see what happens when it rains.
I still need a new roof - eventually - but it's not allowed to leak in the meantime.

Why I need a new roof: Rubber roofs are rubber membrane over plywood. When they leak, the plywood gets soaked and delaminates and gets all ripply and icky - then you patch the membrane but there's no way (PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong about this!!!) to dry out the plywood beneath short of peeling off the rubber entirely and running a fan in a very tall garage, which I don't have. The sun shines on this, and forever after, your roof consists of rubber membrane over steamed plywood.

If you look at the first picture, you can see the ripples of the damaged plywood beneath the rubber. This roof has had a few leaks over the years and really needs to just be taken off and replaced.

When this happens, I'm wondering about other kinds of roofs. I'm not real impressed with the rubber roof. Trees are too much a part of my world. Although I was not the owner when this particular string of C-shaped cuts happened to this roof, I'm sure it will meet low hanging branches with me driving too. This was not such a worry in my DodgeLodges with their aluminum roofs. On the other hand, the rubber's a lot easier to work with than aluminum.

With that chore completed, since I am parked at home instead of at Rendezvous as planned, I installed the traverse rods I'd picked up at a yard sale a few weeks ago. Got rid of the obnoxious green curtain-tops on their 3 inch wide rods that liked to come apart. Now I will be hunting the perfect curtains. Opaque powder blue, I think.

If you are thinking "what's Rendezvous", go to http://buffalowomanstipi.tripod.com and that'll tell you what I like to do on weekends when I'm not fixing RV roofs.