Roofed

I mentioned the ungodly task of stripping off the old roof here.

Got the new roof put on after some delays. Neighbour Rob helped, since he had done roofs before, and had a roofing airgun, which made it all a lot easier. I could have figured it out of course, but it went a lot faster this way. I was largely just the hander and holder - hand stuff up and hold stuff in place. Not so glamorous, but valuable in its own right. And being a giant I’m ideally suited to that.

Ended up being a fun two days actually. Had some great conversations with Rob and learned how to shingle a roof. Don’t know that I’ll have too much cause to do it in my lifetime, but I’m always grateful to learn new skills, no matter what they might be.

The boy had asked a few times if he could come up on the roof while I was stripping it. I’d said no each time. With rusty nails poking up here and there, and loose grit everywhere that acted like a layer of ball bearings (suddenly slipping and sliding because of that caused some puckering), I didn’t want him up there. But with everything done, nothing for him to trip over, and a nice grippy surface, I figured “oh what the hey.”

“You want to come up?” The look on his face was priceless.

With someone on the bottom and top of the ladder, up he came, stepped off, walked to the top and sat down. To get down I held his hand so he could back himself down to the ladder, and then held the ladder when he was on. He did just fine.

Only thing that the perfectionist in me regrets is that there wasn’t enough shingles to do the whole roof by a small handful. Rob calculated we needed 44 for the ridge cap. We were short 8. He had suggested leaving a few grey shingles in case one was damaged in a wind storm or some such. Okay. He had a few black ones in his garage, so I calculated 4 black ones on each end, then 7 grey, and then 4 more black ones, and then the whole center in grey. Bit of balance and symmetry. He miscalculated and I had to cut up a grey shingle to make up the 3 we were short on the end. So now it looks kind of out of balance. Being all about the symmetry, it looks imperfect. It’ll bug me every time I look at that roof now. Oh well.

Shot a quick 360º panorama while I was standing up there, of the little block.