What leak?

(Tom at the saw)        

 Right to left: lobby windows, sliding door to back stage, green room. 

Large building is theater

As I have stated in earlier, the theater is in an 1840’s post and beam barn with several sheds attached to facilitate backstage and the green room. Whenever we had a serious rain storm there would be several leaks, especially in the backstage area, right above and on the electrical system.

To solve the problem we put flashing where the roof meets the barn and even installed a new roof. We believed the problem was solved. Wrong!!! It seems that when the storms come out of the south the leaks return. We had more opinions on what went wrong than you could possibly imagine. The leaks were not coming from any visible source. There was no way of tracing it back to the beginning.

Finally it dawned on somebody that the problem was not with the backstage area, but with the siding on the barn above the roof. Old barns have a board and batten siding. Rough cut lumber (board) is installed vertically and 2” strips of wood (battens) are attached to cover the cracks. The rain was blowing in past the battens and running down the cracks to the room below.

February was quite mild around here and we had men and boys from the county alternative sentencing program to work on projects around the theater. We asked them to remove the battens, therefore creating a flat surface. I bought novelty siding, which are the horizontal boards used on barns and houses. Our crew stained the boards Navaho red to match the other buildings and they installed the new siding. They were working on the roof in sweatshirts in the middle of February!

The Hudson River Shakespeare Company appreciates our attempts at a black box theater setting, but the window above the stage was a problem. We had it covered and when the new siding went on we uncovered it briefly so the new siding could cover it. This allowed a beautiful stream of light to flood the theater. We were finally able to capture interior shots of the theater.