We are lucky enough to have been chosen as our ward's service project for this year. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing but we certainly can use the help. Our roof has been leaking ever since we bought our home. This spring was exceptionally wet, setting and breaking records. I think our hometeacher felt bad when he discovered that during these times of excessive rain our roof turned into an opened faucet inside our house. In order to stem the waterfall we had large buckets strategically positioned to catch these flowing torrents of rain.
Upon discovering our plight, our hometeacher took the news to the Bishop and the wheels were set in motion. Essentially, the ward agreed to provide the manpower, expertise and tools and we provide the materials. With a little help from our experienced High Priests, we were able to find a pretty good deal on roofing supplies. In fact, Brother Andersen helped us estimate the size of our roof and how much we needed in supplies so we could just go shopping for the needed items.
Here we are, Day 1! We have the old white leaky roof and the first workers are already on the scene. We have the dumpster positioned for shingle collection and we're ready to go. Brother Andersen showed up at 8:00 am to supervise this first stage of the process, stripping the old shingles off the roof.
We started in the North East corner of the house, the gable over our bedroom. We were not trying to save shingles but we started carefully in the corner to try and determine just how many layers of shingles were on the roof. We had received roof bids earlier this summer and one contractor offered to to a "roof over" job. But, as everyone knows, you can't have more than three layers of shingles on your roof and I was pretty sure we had at least three layers already.
As more workers showed up we tried to count the layers as we went. At this point we're pretty confident that there were at least FIVE layers of shingles. How could this be, you may ask...? There were three layers of shingles. But under those three layers we found two more layers. It appears that after the first two layers of asphalt shingles had been laid, someone laid tar paper and a new drip edge and started the first of three layer additional layers. So, to the casual observer, there were only three layers. But in stripping the roof we clearly went through 5 layers of shingles.
Five layers poses a real problem to the work. First, it was taking us longer than expected to get the shingles off. Second, our dumpster was only supposed to fit up to two layers of shingles for a roof our size. Third, not related to shingles, we were working in a record breaking heat wave! Our ward must really love us to go through the efforts during a heat wave!
With everyone working so hard our kids were left to fend for themselves. Fortunately school has started (half-days) so David and Donovan are distracted by their education. But the younger children were supposed to stay in the backyard, or (even better) in the basement. Obviously, Quinten decided to play a supervisory roll at one point this afternoon.
Although it has been nothing but clear blue skies, it was decided that we start getting the roof resheeted. The roof was originally done with 1x6 slats, most likely for wood shake shingles. However, the sheeting has never been upgraded, part of the contributing problem with the roof leaks. Once the front of the house was cleared we immediately started the sheeting process.
A small crew worked in front and the rest worked in back clearing the rest of the shingles off the roof. We had removed all of the rain gutters from the front of the house but the back rain gutter is a seamless gutter. Because of its length it had not been removed and we noticed this little problem about the time the shingles were starting to pour off the roof. We immediately went to work with four guys to support the rain gutter (three to hold, one to release/remove). The rain gutter came down quickly and we were back in business removing five layers of old shingles.
This is the mess we were able to avoid by throwing the shingles directly into the dumpster in the front. Carrying the shingles to the dumpster from the back wasn't a realistic option.
At the end of the day we nearly had the entire roof cleared! That was a lot of hard, hot work but we made some amazing progress.
We just have the North West corner of the house, over the boys bedroom, left to clear. We still have the sheeting to complete before we can start putting the new shingles on the roof. Tomorrow we should be able to get the roof sheeted and papered in preparation to start shingles on Thursday.
