The never ending roofing project – which goes hand in hand with the never ending siding project.
As the pictures have shown, we had pretty decent weather during most of this project. Actually a bit warmer and dryer than normal, but that changed.
It turned cold, and it started to rain every couple of days. Windy too, and boy does that get to you while you’re up on the roof. My husband had told his boss that he wouldn’t be available while we were working on this project, and we hoped we’d have things buttoned up enough by April 15th so he could get back to work. We started March 15 – that gave us a month. Oh well, we’ve learned long ago we are usually too optimistic on our timelines! Doesn’t seem to stop us though.
I had taken the first week of April off, and after that was taking days here and there as needed.
We did manage to get the addition framed and sheathed, and now it was mid April and we still had a ways to go. The electric company sent two guys out to rerun the power to the house
and we had them disconnect the power to the barn at the same time.
Once that was done, we got to work on roofing.
The new section wasn’t all that bad. And we didn’t have too much trouble with framing up the overlap from the old section onto the new one. We ripped back the shingles on the old roof where the new roof overlapped, and things looked pretty good. The sheathing under the cedar shingles looked decent, we figured that we wouldn’t need to sheath over that, so went ahead and framed where the two roofs joined, then got the new section roofed. We did have some difficulty with rain, and bought a couple of big tarps. We’ve had every section of the roof tarped at some point during this phase of the project.
We had planned on roofing the new section and re-roofing the old section up to the valley. Not a problem – just tear off the old shingles back to the valley pan and put the new ones down. Opps, forgot this is an OLD house!
We started running into problems as we finished tearing off shingles on the north (oldest) half of the old roof. This was the part where we found the cedar shingles. The previous owners had re-roofed the house in the not too distant path, but they used 1” nails, and they weren’t penetrating into the sheathing (two layers of shingles and a layer of shakes to go through) made it real easy to tear off. Bought a special shovel with teeth to make the job easier, and that was a real time saver.
On the back side of the house we used the skidsteer to haul the shingles to the truck, and then hauled them to the dump. The Mitchell dump is not that far away, so at least that made things easier. They know my husband by sight now, but there aren’t too many people driving beat up old ½ ton Chev (85) pickups. We tell people it’s done rusting.
When he got his new truck last year (94 chev desiel ¾ ton) the old truck was suppose to be retired. But you know how it is for mechanics – nothing is put to rest until it simply can’t be resurrected any more. He’s found it’s too nice having two trucks – one he can keep relatively nice, and one he can drive anywhere and haul junk in with out a care.
Back to the roof – the farther I got to the east end (and the valley) the worse things got. The sheathing (3/4 boards) was loose and rotted in areas, with big gaps between the boards. Someone had patched the roof in places (were chimneys had originally been) but patched at the level of the shakes, so the patches had to be replaced with something that matched the level of the sheathing. We were removing a layer of brown shingles, then a layer of white shingles, then the shakes. At one point the roof was red (that’s the color of the shingles over the section of the roof that was roofed over (changed the pitch) so we know the shakes had been roofed over at least three times.
Well, so far, not a major issue, we could continue with our plans – then I got to the valley.
¶ 7:54 PM
