One job I never want.

I helped a friend strip the roof off his garage this weekend.

Whatever roofers get paid, it can’t possibly be enough.

What a shitty, miserable job. 

The fact that it was brutally hot, only added to the misery. I started as early as possible, but there wasn’t much getting around the fact that it was an absolute scorcher out there. The second (11 hours of work) day I counted 19 1 liter bottles of water, 2 1 liter bottles of Gatorade, innumerable freezies, a few beers afterwards. I also made sure to wear this cooling band, since I knew from using it before, it makes a noticeable difference.

I’m not afraid of heights, but I’m not so keen on being up on a ladder or a roof. I built roofs when I worked as a framer, and can’t say I really dug it all that much. Never stripped a roof before, and haven’t ever shingled a roof before, and I guess it’s good to be able to say I’ve done it, but once is plenty for me.

I’m really fit for my age, but two days of forcing up and manhandling tons of roofing shingles and tar paper under the sweltering sun, takes a toll. I can really feel my hamstrings, my shoulders ache, my knees are sore. There are two nasty wounds on the tops of my thumbs where blisters broke open. My toes feel like someone beat them with a hammer, from sitting on my haunches and having them pushed right into the tips of my boots. My feet feel like they sat on a hot plate set to simmer. I wore climbing shoes for the grip on the first day, and while they worked well in that regard, the heat went right through the bottoms. My butt cheeks feel like I backed into a circular sander, from sitting on hot roofing shingles. I wore some crappy old clothes and the shirt I wore was in the reject bin largely because the sleeves didn’t fit my gibbon like arms. So now I have a sunburn around my wrist, between the bottom of the sleeves and the tops of my gloves. Forgot to put sunscreen on the first day. I did the second day, but the damage was done.

I’ve seen old insurance maps of the city that were done in 1921 (being a total map geek, they’re super cool) and they show the garage already being there. So at least 90 years old. Two layers of more modern roofing shingles, but done at different times, two layers or shingling material that came in rolls, also done at different times (one came up in fairly large chunks, the older one below broke into little chunks) that were nailed down along the edges an inch apart, and then coated in tar, and two layers of tar paper beneath that. The roof wasn’t leaky, but at the urging of the insurance company, they decided to tear off the old, lay on plywood, all of which we achieved this weekend, now comes the new tar paper, and new shingles.

The first side I tackled was a little easier. A fence I could brace myself on, and I could dump all the debris down the side, onto a tarp to be disposed of later. 

The second side on the second day was a lot trickier. With a vegetable garden right underneath, we wanted to avoid just letting it all slip off the edge. We built a slide of sorts out of a tarp and some aluminum slats so that anything that did fall over (inevitable), it would be easier to collect and avoid damage as much as possible. Still, I was fighting against gravity by trying to throw as much over the other side, so only about ¾ of it was completed. I got there at 06:00 this morning to finish it, as the newscast called for possible thunderstorms. As I was up there it started to rain, but fortunately it lasted only a few minutes. Got it all off, got all the plywood on, as well as the ridge cap we saved from the original. Then we called it a day.

Now comes the fun task. Getting 13, 85lb. (I swear they’re more) bundles of shingles up to the roof. When I hear that roofers have to carry two of those monsters at a time up a ladder, and do it all day – all I can say is, my version of hell, would be roofing for an eternity.

The whole time I was doing it I was telling my friends kid that he had best do well in school, otherwise he could look forward to doing dangerous, backbreaking labour like roofing in scorching or freezing temperatures as a career. I was more than happy to help a friend, but the prospect of doing that all the time, inspires a shudder. Not a chance I will ever do that again.