I think I have complained enough over the last few months on Facebook and to everyone I see that my house is the “House of 1000 Leaks”. Every time it rains outside I find another leak, because the jackass contractor, Mr. T. G., who flipped my house before unloading his handiwork on me, didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it came to roofing. So this past winter, every time the snow would melt, the laundry room roof would leak, all this spring when we got days upon days of rain, the roof leaked. I had strategically placed buckets that were routinely quite full.
Fast forward to this past weekend, the rain had finally cleared up and we have had a few nice weeks of warm, sunny weather. I organized help with Capt. Insano, his father Diamond Dave, Dinker and my little brother Aaron offered his help on Sunday. We looked at the forecast and it looked good for roofing, Friday was warm and sunny, Saturday was supposed to be warm and sunny with only a 10% chance of rain in the afternoon, and Sunday looked even warmer and more sunny. Great, let the games begin.
Friday comes and I take a half day off of work to go to the eye doctor’s office and then go and help The Capt. tear off the roof. Great plan, I’m out early, so I go and pick up all of my water and ice barrier and then head to the eye doctor. As I just get to the office, my phone rings and its L Bird. She has a flat tire at work, so I tell her I will be over to change it when I pick up A Bird from daycare. I send The Capt. a quick text to give him a heads up that I would be late, great no problem. I finish my eye doctor appointment and head over to L Bird’s work to change the tire. I get there and the tire isn’t flat, it’s just low. So I check the tire and L Bird tells me that the valve stem is broke and it wouldn’t take air. Yep, sure enough the valve stem is broken. I take off the tire and lug it to the auto repair shop next door. They look at it and inform me that the valve stem isn’t broken, it’s the tire pressure monitor that is broke and it really needs to be fixed, but they could do it that afternoon. OK fine, change the thing and get me the hell out of there so I can help The Capt. get the roof off. Well, 45 minutes later they wheel me out a fixed tire. I pay the bill, rush back to L Bird’s work and put the tire back on. By now it’s almost 5 pm, so I am ONLY 4 hours late to get home, I rush and pick A Bird up and head for home. I pull in and The Capt. is on the roof with a pile of destruction on the ground of shingles, tar paper, wood, pine branches and I get the “Gee, thanks for the help!”. But it was all in good fun, because he knew what a pain in the ass day it was for me.
Now here comes Saturday, I get up and get the garbage cans all ready to go to the dump when I notice that it is starting to sprinkle and I have nothing but wood showing on the roof. 10% chance of rain, yeah right. Its only my luck. I quickly scramble and steal every tarp I had and threw them on the roof. Then I run the trash cans to the dump as The Capt. calls and says he’s on his way and that we should get the water and ice barrier down before it really starts raining. I get the cans dumped off and head to the house right as he is showing up. So we climb up on the roof and start pulling the rest of the nails and laying water and ice down.
Notice the classic Diamond Dave butt crack. He’s even wearing a belt, I know crazy right? I can’t explain it.
The Captain finishing up the last little bit of water and ice over T.G.’s cob jobbed corner.
Because we were rained out and didn’t get the shingles until the afternoon, we decided to wait on laying them until Sunday. So we decided to fix the other problem area on the back of the laundry room, the soffits and fascia. When the wind blows real hard it was blowing the rain up into the soffits and then it was leaking back into the house. So we figured we would find out why that was happening. Well, it didn’t take long to figure it out. We pulled off the aluminum trim pieces and BAM, there it was. There was just the end of the rafters and the insulation showing right through, there was no wood, nothing but this chinsy little piece of tin separating the inside of the house and the outside. Again, I applaud your short cuts, T.G. you SOB. After that fact had been discovered we ran to the lumber store and got lumber and did the job right, then put a new piece of aluminum trim up over the wood, so now we are all air tight and won’t leak.
After the water and ice and the soffit/fascia fix Saturday was spent. The Captain and I built a fire with the downed pine branches and drank beer before we smoked out the neighborhood and decided it would be a good idea to put the fire out.
Sunday came awful early and we started laying shingles. Luckily for me, my little brother Aaron came over to help, He’s a quick learner and was good help. We were just about finished with the section we had taken off, when we decided that we should probably go higher and take off more over a real spongy spot we found as we were working.
That means pulling off more shingles and plywood, stuffing in more insulation because there were 6 foot stretches in between the rafters that had none. But we managed to get it done and we finally finished around 7 pm that night.
That was the end of another long, long weekend of roofing adventures. The roof is done and that area will never leak for a long time. Thank God for good friends and good family.
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