`Five-Year Roof Certification' Is Just For Show

Q: My mortgage broker required a "five-year roof certification" before closing on the house I recently bought. What exactly does this mean?

A: Roof certifications are not roof guarantees. Most roofers won't guarantee their own new roofs for five years, much less an old roof they didn't install. (I've seen five-year roof certifications performed on roofs that would need a five-year tarp.) This paperwork is used to ease buyers' and lenders' fears of imminent roof replacement. The thing to keep in mind is that no one assumes any liability with a roof certification. They can't.

For your peace of mind, your best bet is to get an unbiased opinion from a home inspector or engineer, unquestionably working for you, who will give you a realistic assessment of roof condition without any preconceptions, conflicts of interest, or desire to sell you a new roof.

Q: The linoleum tiles near my toilet are beginning to peel up. The rest of the bathroom floor tiles seem to be fairly well-secured. What kind of glue should I use to readhere them so they stick for good?

A: You don't have a glue problem; you have a bad wax ring seal at the base of the toilet. A wax ring looks like a doughnut (costs about the same, too). It is placed on the toilet flange - the plumbing in the floor. The toilet then is set on the wax ring and slightly compresses it to seal the toilet to the flange.

Wax rings get brittle after a number of years and leak, sometimes abruptly, with a lot of toilet water dumping on your floor. The majority of the leaks are more insidious, small quantities of water over long periods of time.

Unfortunately, plumbing code requires that perimeters of toilets be sealed to the floor with caulking. This is so that if the wax ring fails, methane gas is not released into the home to spontaneously combust. (Dave Barry, are you listening?) But by sealing in the gas, you're also sealing in the leaking water.

Water follows the path of least resistance, and many times that can be underneath the bathroom floor and into the structural members of the house, unbeknown to the residents.

Your flooring is peeling up because the wood members underneath are soaked. Ignored, the next thing that will happen is the floor will begin to get a little spongy underfoot.

Every bathroom I inspect gets the floor checked with a pinless moisture meter (to detect water below the surface of the flooring), and amazingly, about half have wax rings in various stages of deterioration. Massive damage can and does occur if this problem is left to fester over long periods.

My advice is to change the wax ring every 10 years so the odds you'll have problems are greatly reduced. This is cheap insurance against a very serious, all-too-common problem that is easily avoided, but not usually thought of as a regularly scheduled maintenance item. It should be.

If you have the stomach for it, changing a wax ring is very simple: Turn off the water supply at the floor or wall behind the toilet. Flush twice. Disconnect the water-supply pipe from the bottom of the toilet. Cut away the caulking around the perimeter at the toilet base. Loosen the toilet bolts and lift it out. Have many washable/disposable rags handy - water will splash. Tip the toilet slightly on its edge to clean the residual wax from the base. Clean the wax off the flange at the floor. Place the new wax ring on the flange and lift the toilet back over the wax ring, aligning bolts as you go. Push squarely down to seat the toilet in wax and bolt them together firmly.

If you have always dreamed of a new toilet - and who hasn't? - consider it. You'd be surprised how inexpensive they are. Change the bolts if they aren't in excellent condition. If the flange is not flush with the floor surface of a tile or hardwood floor, use two wax rings, one with a built-in funnel. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ask The Expert answers readers' questions every Saturday. Send questions to Ask The Expert, Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111, or call 206-464-8514 to leave your questions on Ask The Expert's recorded line. E-mail address is dhay@seattletimes.com