Fixing the roof

We are expecting a crew of roofers (couvreurs or "coverers" in French) to show up early this morning. The job they'll do will involve taking tiles off part of the roof of our house, replacing the sheet metal in the "valleys" on either side of the dormer window over the kitchen, and then putting the roof tiles back on. That will, in theory, fix a leak that we've been dealing with for a month or so. Then the roofers will clean out the rain gutters and downspouts on the front and back of the house and to make sure that rain water flows freely when the rains come back.

The roofer says the valleys on either side of the dormer are not wide enough and not deep enough. This isn't the first time we've had leakage. We had a spectacular flood in the kitchen on one June day in 2007. By the way, in French a dormer or dormer window is called une lucarne or, strangely, un chien-assis. Yes, that's "a sitting dog."

Here's what the dormer looks like. The small dormer window is above our kitchen window.

And below is the result of the leaky dormer. It's a stain on a wall up in our loft space.

I was just looking at the Météo60 web site where information about monthly rainfall totals is posted. At the weather station closest to us, which in in Romorantin 15 miles east of Saint-Aignan, I see that we had more than twice the amount of rain in May than we would expect to get (120 millimeters instead of 50). So far in June, we've had nearly 150 millimeters or rainfall and the month is not over yet. That's three times our average rainfall for June. In April, we got about 50 mm, and in March we got about 100 mm.