September catch-up, and it's October!!

I keep having gaps in my interest in writing, then a flurry of posts, then another gap...

To update on a couple things: I had a tree company haul off the limb that was leaning on the house a couple weeks ago. I haven't gotten the bill, but the estimate was pretty reasonable, given the scope of work involved. I fixed the roof that Saturday. I spent more time on it than I expected, mostly because the pitch for that section of my roof is steep enough that I wasn't comfortable working on it. It wasn't bad, but I felt it appropriate to take my time, rather than fall off.

Yeah, I've heard the expression, "It's not the fall that hurts, it's the sudden stop at the bottom." Add the abrasions of sliding down a shingle roof, and, well, it seemed better to avoid the experience altogether. I took my time.

The shingles turned out to not be a really good match, but I'm not worried. The angle is such that most folks driving by won't notice the difference. I know my roof isn't leaking, so I'm okay with how it is.

This first picture is of the roof deck, once I removed the damaged shingles. It's easier to see the size and location of the hole this way:

 It took less than a third of a sheet of Oriented Strand Board (OSB) to fix the roof deck. I bought a bundle of shingles, and used less than a dozen of them. I used a piece of Roofer's Felt about five feet long. First the deck repairs:

I didn't bother taking a picture of the roof between this step and having installed the shingles. It's just a roof, after all.

However, the shingle color difference is striking when viewed from above. Part of this is that the original roof on the house is now fourteen years old. It's probably a twenty-year roof, but might have been done with twenty-five year shingles. We are planning for replacing the roof within the next five years, based on the wear I noted while playing around on the roof this time.

I was able to straighten the drip edge (white aluminum seen in the second image) enough that it looks fine from below. The shingle color difference isn't as striking when viewed from the street.

One thing that came out of my several trips up on and off of the roof was that my ladder was beginning to worry me. If you know much about ladders, you know that they are rated for their weight capacity--Type IA, Type I, Type II, and Type III are common ratings, with Type III the lightest, at two hundred pounds capacity. I jokingly called my ladder a Type IV. I found it beside a dumpster behind a paint store seven years ago, and kept it around because it was good enough to do most of what I needed it to do. However, the locking mechanism on one side had a recently-broken spring, and I was only willing to carry a couple shingles up at a time (rather than an entire bundle), lest the thing fail on me.

I decided that it was time to buy a good ladder.

I rode to work (my part-time job at that orange box store that sells lumber, shingles, and all manner of other home repair and maintenance stuff) the next day, pulling my trailer so that I could bring home a good ladder.

The old ladder was nominally a sixteen-foot extension ladder, meaning that its full extension was roughly fourteen feet. There are a couple of places on my house that I cannot safely reach, so I opted for a longer ladder. I now own a 20' Type II extension ladder.

And, yes, I used my bike trailer to get it home, for a couple of reasons: I could, and it was actually a better choice than using the car. To use the car, I would have had to use padding of some sort to protect the roof, PLUS ropes to tie it to the car. I would still have worried about tearing up something on the car. The trailer almost looks like a ladder to many who ask about it, so it was a simple matter to haul the ladder home. Jenn needed the car that afternoon, and I typically ride to work anyway, so...

The hole in the roof deck shown above came with a corresponding hole in my soffit. The soffit pieces are aluminum, and I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to straighten the damaged pieces enough that they would look okay.

The soffit after the storm:

 

After I spent about five minutes actually working on the pieces and reinstalling them:

I was surprised at how good the repaired soffit looks.

And, since the tree outfit removed the big pile of debris from my driveway when they removed the limb, I can get in and out of my garage much more easily!