New owner and Ceiling leak.

Megskitchen · Thu Mar 08, 2012 8:31 pm

Hello, my husband and I just bought a 69 skyline mobile home and we are very excited, but also very new to any sort of home ownership challenges. So I have a couple of probably very stupid questions. First off, is there any way to tell for sure if someone did some remodeling before us?
We suspect someone did, mostly because there is Owens-corning fiberglass insulation in the ceiling. Second, is there any general advice about owning an older home like this. Finally, there was a leak when we bought it in the ceiling of the hallway. We have pulled down the ceiling there, and the insulation, which was soaked. Water was pooling in the vapor barrier and we probably removed 2-3 gallons of water from a 2.5x10 foot section. My husband has sealed the area of the roof we suspect was the culprit and now we are trying to dry stuff out. My main question may be stupid, but there is a kind of board between the roof and the rafters. It is black on the side we can see. In the place most damaged by water it has actually disintegrated a bit. We dont want to pull down more of the ceiling if we can help it, so do we need to replace this, seal it in? Just not sure what steps to take before putting up new insulation and replacing the vapor barrier. Help!

bobfather99 · Fri Mar 09, 2012 2:00 am

So far, so good on your plan. Seal up the leak, dry everything out. Replace what's damaged.

Id give the roof a good look, you may have more than one leak. Once you know you're "dry", you replace the insulation that got nasty, then repair/replace the ceiling and texture/paint.

DCDiva · Sat Mar 17, 2012 9:24 pm

Hi Welcome to the forum! I own 2--1973 mobile homes and they are pledged with problems ---one of the mobile homes had drywall for the ceiling and it was way too heavy for the trusses and cause many of the same problems you have currently.In another mh, we left the trusses and used Masonite as the ceiling ,very light weight. The other we had to replace the trusses do to snow damage(I think I have some old posts on my roof replacements), but both roofs were too bad and we added a roof over the mh. But replacing the roof the way the repair book says has a win win as you can add insulation,strengthen the roof and add soffit for a gutter, if the mh were closer to our home--we live 3 hours away--we would not have done the totally new roof plus the area has a high snow loads.
Melissa in WV