As Honey was talking on the phone to her sister Maria down in Weirton yesterday, Maria complained that a simple once-over cleaning of their sunroom had morphed into move-everything, clean-everything including the ceiling.

“I’ve got that beat,” my wife said. “I have scaffolding in my living room.”

She explained, “It was a surprise when I came home. My crazy husband suddenly decided it was the time to fix the leak around the chimney. I told him and told him to just hire a contractor, but no, Mr. Stubborn has to do it himself. Everything is moved, I don’t know where. Dust and dirt on everything. I sit in my recliner and chunks of drywall fall on my head.”

What seemed so out of the blue to Honey was to me the natural culmination of a long, thoughtful planning process. I waited for the perfect conditions to launch a project of this magnitude. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought it through, mentally designing strategies to defeat the leak, cataloguing the tools and materials I would need, how and where to place the scaffolding and how to secure it, and when the family’s men and boys might be available to horse it up from the barn and into the house. I had to wait until the garden and the pumpkin patch were done so I could devote my energies to the leak. I had to wait for an end to the endless drought. How could I tell if the leak is fixed if it never rains?

Every project has its history, and this leak’s history began when I built our geodesic dome house 43 years ago. They warned us that domes leak, but I wasn’t afraid. I said, if it leaks, I’ll fix it.

I’ve been fixing it for 43 years. I can state in all modesty that I’ve become an expert on leaks, both fixing and creating.

My core philosophy now is, “don’t cut holes in a perfectly good roof.” That applies to anything with a roof, including cars, as many with a sunroof or convertible can attest.

In my defense, the designers of our dome home specified that we could safely violate the perfection of the dome roof by adding skylights, dormers and extensions. I put in four skylights, two dormers and two extensions. Both dormers leaked, and flying squirrels moved into the hollow roof space of the larger one. I built flat roofs, as specified, on the kitchen and living room extensions. They leaked, so eventually I built peaked roofs overtop. When I put on a new roof three years ago I completely tore off the leaking dormer, and kicked the flying squirrels out of the other one as I rebuilt it.

The big mistake I can’t blame on anyone else was putting a masonry chimney for our woodstove right up through the top of our roof. That persistent leak, to borrow from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” has proved “the most unkindest cut of all.” It has been my bugaboo, my Waterloo, my fatal flaw.

In recent years when Honey nagged me to get the leak around the chimney fixed, again, I told her it couldn’t be done until I put on a new roof. I admit procrastinating on the roof for, oh, 15 years, but when I finally did it, I did it right. Me, an old man of 72 (but not really feeling it) worked over the fall of 2022 and into the winter and spring. I tore off the old shingles and replaced water-damaged framing and plywood. I carried bundles of shingles up a 20-foot ladder. I worked in the dark and the rain and the cold. I applied new synthetic underlayment and multiple layers of ice guard, materials that did not exist 43 years ago, before nailing on new shingles. The leaking sunroofs got this treatment. I doubled and tripled layers of moisture-shedding materials around the chimney where it emerges from the roof. “Redundancy” was my middle name. I did, and overdid.

And the result?

To again tread on sacred lines from “Julius Caesar,” “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,” but in my case when the tide came in the chimney STILL LEAKED. But, significantly, not as much.

Nevertheless, even a little leak is too much for a drywall ceiling, which willingly commits suicide by sucking at any available moisture. So here I am, an old man of 75 (and feeling it now), standing on scaffolding 24 feet above our living room floor, working overhead with aching shoulders.

My plan now is to implement my secret strategy for mitigating the leak, repair the drywall, declare victory and leave. That’s what Nixon did to get out of Vietnam. I know it didn’t work out well for him, but he was a crook.

That, plus spraying the roof around the chimney with three cans of Flex-Seal.