It's Just a Patch to the Roof

With the back eaves of the house closed in, we moved the scaffolding around to the side. We got this scaffolding from a friend a couple of years ago, and mostly have not used it until this year. The boards that came with it were rotted through, so we've been using a stiff ladder and a 2x12 as a work platform.

Last week, we made some minor improvements to the scaffolding that made a big difference. Noel took a trip to the scaffolding supplier and picked up a new set of joint pins to replace the horrifying wooden pegs that kept getting stuck.

That's what used to rather shakily hold the two sections of scaffolding together. It worked, but the top level always moved around on you.

The new pins really tie the levels of scaffolding together tightly, and it feels much more secure.

He also picked up a fancy new aluminum stage, which is way lighter than the ladder, and way easier to manage than the combination of ladder and board. It also allows us to use the ladder in conjunction with the scaffolding, which is nice.

It also feels more secure; I climbed up on it in clogs today without feeing like I might fall to my death. This is a bonus. And frankly, the scaffolding even before improvements was a billion times better than a ladder leaned up against the house.

With both of us on the scaffolding, it was fast work this morning to get the one long fascia board up and in place. Then I went off to run some errands and Noel got to work on some small roof repairs.

I came home to find this old vent on the ground. That was just sticking out of the roof attached to nothing for years, too close to the edge of the roof to easily remove during our other roof escapades. We didn't feel too strong an urge to remove it because it didn't seem to actually leak all that much, but that could be me romanticizing things. At any rate, it definitely was not going to stay.

This is where the pipe came out. This is pretty much right over our kitchen stove, and for years we were convinced the external rusty vent was attached to the pipe that comes down in the cabinet over our stove and connected to the vent hood. But in fact the vent hood is a recirculating hood (boo! hiss!) and that pipe goes to nowhere.

As is usual with repairs to our roof, we got to count how many layers of roofing were over this part. I only see five here: two layers of wooden shingles, and three layers of asphalt.

Noel cut a piece of plywood to fill in the hole, but you can see that with all that roofing around it, the plywood was substantially below the level of the roof.

So he padded it out with layers of asphalt shingles. You want your patched area to be about level with the rest of the roof so water doesn't pool there, causing leaks.

And there it is. I picked up a real piece of vent stack flashing while running errands, to put around the vent from our kitchen sink plumbing. Very tidy.

Then it was time for Noel to get off the scaffolding, because the skies were getting dark with rain clouds. The scaffolding is very nice for working on under normal conditions, but it would not be good to be on that in the rain.

posted by ayse on 11/19/11