Mending the Roof

The weather report said there was a 20 percent chance of rain today. Given that, and the many other times a 20 percent chance of rain has meant losing a day of work because the rain didn't come, Noel decided to head out onto the roof.

His goal? That disused chimney pipe in the middle of the roof. It's not flashed properly, and leaks horribly every year. So our plan was to remove it and re-roof over it. With the practise of having roofed the chicken house, Noel was feeling confident.

The first step was to remove the shingles around the pipe. There was a fair amount of damage there, mostly from previous failed attempts at repairing the problem (none of which seems to have considered removing the pipe altogether).

It's not that the pipe wasn't flashed at all. Here we see Noel waving the flashing from the base. It's just that it was flashed well below the current level of the roof. And incorrectly.

Over the years, we've talked about just sort of cutting this pipe off in the attic. But it made more sense to pull it out. It was not secured at all, so it came out easily.

And slid off the roof easily, too.

If we wondered what happened to the old kitchen cabinet doors when they redid the kitchen way back when, here they are. Used as a plywood base for the flashing.

And then we had a hole in the roof! Right around this point a neighbor came out and said, "Did you know you have a hole in your roof?" No. No, we did not know, neighbor.

But the fun was not over. Noel spent quite a bit of time removing rotted material, the remains of various repairs, old shingles, wooden shakes, and all sorts of stuff from around the hole. Many of the shakes were rotted away completely, and there was a layer of dirt that needed cleaning up. The key was to get all the failed repairs and dirt out of the way so that we could put in a level deck for the new shingles.

Just we Noel got the area cleaned out and started re-shingling, the rain started. I was working on my own project at the time and it was pretty unpleasant at ground level, so up on the roof it must have been a laugh riot.

When it was all done, Noel lost his mind and pushed everything off the roof. My idea had been to roll out a plastic tarp and push things onto that. Instead he will be cleaning up the garden by hand.

End result: one patched-up roof. We still have one other major leak, and a few minor leaks. But this is pretty good as a start.

Technorati Tags: construction, demolition, rain, roof

posted by ayse on 11/08/08