How did we get here? We just bought a house… and now we’re learning about ice dams the hard way. In this little “Figuring It Out as we go” moment, Jack saw a TikTok about how damaging ice dams can be for your roof, so of course we woke up, looked at our roof after all the Maine snow, and realized we had some pretty solid ones. Cue the first-time-homeowner panic: how do we fix this ourselves so we’re not staring down long-term roof damage? Jack started by using a snow rake the previous owners left for us (honestly, thank you so much) to pull excess snow off the roof. We didn’t have a ladder to get to the best spots, but we did have windows with decent access, so we tried the salt trick and watched it actually start working—seeing that solid ice from yesterday turning and breaking up was such a relief. The next day, the salt seemed to do a really good job and Jack even got a massive chunk of ice off. We still had a section we couldn’t reach, so I headed to Home Depot to rent a ladder—also, everyone there is always so nice and they literally loaded it into my car for me. Who let us buy a building?