Naptime DIY: What is that stain on my ceiling?

A stain on the ceiling means water leaked down or a soda bottle exploded up.  While neither one is pleasant, the water stain leaking down is much more problematic.  Sometimes though, all is not as it appears in home improvement.  Recently we had a water stain that would’ve taken 10 minutes to fix, had I listened to my inner voice or read this post.

When we moved in there was a linear bulge in the ceiling where it looked like drywall had been replaced.  It was a straight line, not very wide and stretched for about 3 feet.  I knew there was water damage at some point I said to myself.

Fast forward 4 years and a series of brown stains appeared on the ceiling in that same vicinity.  Some of the stains looked like lines that were dripping down the line from a pile and two looked like singular drops of water the resulted in a stain on the ceiling.

Shoot, we must have a leak somewhere upstairs I said to myself. Because the location of the stain I knew it was impossible for it to have been roof related; so after procrastinating for a couple of months I called a plumber.   They came out and said that the leak could be anywhere up there and the only way to be certain was to remove the ceiling/drywall.

Not wanting to make a mess in the house then we put the job off.  After procrastinating a couple more months; I got a plumber out to the house to finally dig into the ceiling to see what was caused the brown stain.  Mind you, this brown stain on the ceiling had not gotten any worse since I initially saw the brown spots many months ago.

The plumber warned us that the ‘leak’ may never appear.  It might simply be a one-off occurrence from condensation that dripped down from the duct work, a rogue water spill or something else that only happened 1 time.  After spending 3 hours poking around our ceiling, running water from the upstairs and flushing all the toilets in the house the leak never appeared.

After that 3 hour period he asked if we wanted to dig into the rest of the brown spots.  I told him that I would simply paint the rest of the brown stains will Kilz and see if they reappear.

2 months later-and multiple water tests of my own no leaks, drips or anything resembling moisture of any kind has appeared.

Was it a leak?  It’s possible, but since I had my doubts from the get go I should have painted it with Kilz immediately.  If it returned then it’s a leak, if not, then it’s a mysterious one-off happening that makes home ownership such a joy.

  As a stay at home dad I miss having the spare time to fix things. Even though the children are my full time job, things still break or need a fix in the house. Sometimes the repair will be something that I can easily complete and other times it’s a repair that I simply should pay to have done.  Regardless, I’ll write it up here in hopes that you may be able to gauge what you can do and when you need to call in for help. The series is called, Naptime DIY because the tasks are hopefully accomplished in 60 minutes, which is a good naptime period.  In this case I should have primed the area to see if that fixed it-and it would’ve.