Whenever I see a new house under construction and notice skylights being installed, I cringe. Hopefully, times have changed, but back in the 1980s when my husband and I thought it would be “cool” to have skylights in our newly-manufactured mobile home, little did we know they would end up making our lives a living hell.
For one thing, all three of the skylights in our home began to leak after only three years. The one in the bathroom was the first…and the worst.
I’ll admit I was the one who thought having a skylight directly above the bathtub would be great…lying back, relaxing and soaking while gazing up at the stars. Too soon I discovered, to my disappointment, my hot baths steamed up the skylight in about 10 seconds flat, so I saw absolutely nothing through it.
The view also
became obscured if my husband didn’t regularly climb up a ladder and keep the
outside of the skylights free from dust, pollen and pine pitch. And the fact
the skylights were considered sources of “natural” light and therefore took the
place of regular ceiling lights, when there was a heavy snowfall and they got
buried, it was like living underground with the Mole People (note: for those of you "youngsters" The Mole People was a pretty corny 1950s sci-fi movie about an underground civilization of very pale creatures). 
OUR MOBILE HOME WITH THE SKYLIGHTS
CIRCA 1988
On the hot evenings in the summer when my baths were in cooler water, so the skylight didn’t get steamy and the view was clear, too often the Concord National Guard would do fly-overs, as part of its nighttime helicopter-pilot training.
It made me uneasy because I felt certain the Guards could look down through my skylight and into my well-lit bathroom and see me lying back in the tub. I imagined them pointing and saying things like “Quick! Get me a harpoon!”
However, the bathroom skylight eventually did offer me at least something to
look at as I soaked – ugly brown water stains on the white ceiling. At first, I sprayed a sealer on the
stains and then painted over them, but it didn’t take long for them to seep
through again, even browner an uglier.
When it got to the point where I would lie back in the tub and make a game of guessing what shape each water stain on the ceiling most closely resembled (one of them looked just like a three-legged horse, and another like a cigar-smoking turtle), I knew the time finally had come to call a roofing company.
The representative said the problem was the flashing around the skylights and also the fact shingled roofs offered little protection against them leaking. By the time he was through with his sales pitch, he'd convinced us to switch to a galvanized steel roof. The thought of no more shingles blowing off in the wind, no more snow piling up on the roof, no more leaky skylights, and a warranty that neither of us would live long enough ever to see expire, really appealed to us. We were hooked.
The price, however, was another story.
“I can sell a bunch of stuff on eBay,” I said to my husband. “I figure if we
sell all of your power tools, all of my jewelry, the TV and your coin
collection, we can at least afford the down payment. By the way, do we really
need two cars?”
So we called the roofing company a few weeks later and signed our lives away.
“If we order the materials tomorrow, they should be here in about three weeks,” the company representative told us. “Then there are several other homes ahead of yours. But we’ll call you and let you know exactly when we’ll be over to do the work.”
One morning only a few days later, I crawled out of bed and walked into the
bathroom. As I stood there in my nightgown, yawning and scratching assorted
body parts, I glanced up at the skylight and saw a man standing there on my
roof!
That’s when I vaguely recalled hearing footsteps overhead earlier, while I
still was in bed. But because we’d always had squirrels running across our
roof, I’d just figured the critters had gained a few pounds.
I panicked. With two skylights in the living room and one in the bathroom, I
suddenly felt as if I were the star of a peepshow.
I dashed back into the bedroom and discreetly peeked out through the blinds. I
could see the roofing company’s truck parked in the driveway and figured they
probably were taking dimensions. I rushed to get dressed so I could head outside and see what was going on. Under the circumstances, I didn’t think
taking a shower or a bath beneath the skylight would be such a great idea…not
unless I wanted to risk making the guy on the roof fall off from laughing so hard.
When I finally emerged from the front door, I saw three men – two on the roof
and one standing on the ground. They stopped to stare at me.
“You’ve been home all this time?” the guy on the ground asked in a way that made me suspect he was worried about what I might have overheard.
“Yeah, but I was sound asleep,” I said. I noticed they’d already done some work
on the roof, which surprised me. It made me wonder if I’d been asleep or in a
coma.
“Turns out we didn’t have to order the materials after all,” one of the guys on
the roof explained. “So we figured we’d get this job done today, seeing it’s
the smallest one we have to do.”
I smiled, thinking how shocked my husband would be when he came home that night
and saw the new roof already on our place.
By the end of their workday, the crew had completed about 75 percent of the
roof, which I thought still was pretty impressive. They said they would be back
bright and early in the morning to finish the job.
But as it turned out, they didn’t return the next day, nor the next, or even the
day after that. Why not? Because the moment they said, “We’ll be back,” the
skies opened up and exploded with so much rain, I was afraid the mobile home might float away.
And which 25 percent of the roof didn’t they finish before the rain? The area
surrounding the bathroom skylight, of course.…which meant the relentless
rainfall added an assortment of new stains – one of which resembled a headless
scarecrow – to the existing collage on the ceiling.
But I did discover there was one good thing about the skylight being located directly over the bathtub – when the ceiling started to drip, at least I didn’t have to go search for a bucket.
Did the new roof put an end to the leaky skylights?
For a while. Then they all started to leak again. But we discovered we weren’t alone. We talked to several other people who also had skylights, and every one of them said theirs also had leaked at some point.
So my current house has no skylights, and never will, unless a meteorite comes crashing through the roof.
Still, now when I’m soaking in the tub, I do kind of miss seeing the shapes of the ceiling stains overhead…especially the cigar-smoking turtle.
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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
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