In over your head

I still remember the day my wife and I first got a look inside the house we were eventually going to buy. We liked the living room. We loved the view through the 10-foot sliding glass doors. But the roof over the screened porch outside those doors was dreadful. It was made of those horrible old wavy fiberglass panels that were discoloured and cracked. I swore that roof would be the first thing to go when we moved in. That was six years ago. Last week I got around to actually ripping it off. I am that far behind in my to-do list.

It’s not like I got used to the roof. I hated it with every bone in my body. Even if you forgave it for being butt-ugly, it leaked like a sieve. I thought everyone knew that the whole idea of those wavy panels was to nail through the peaks so that the nail holes were high and dry when it rained. Whoever installed my roof nailed it in the valleys. To guarantee maximum leakage, I guess. How I put up with that eyesore for six long years is anybody’s guess. A tight renovation budget had a lot to do with it.

These days they make corrugated roof panels that are infinitely better than the fiberglass stuff I just removed but they’re expensive and besides — I was sick of looking up at the roof trusses and crossers overhead. I wanted a real roof, finished on the inside with tongue-and-groove pine and maybe even recessed lighting. Oh yeah, and it had to be cheap because my budget was still about $1.98.

I had some slightly used four-by-eight plywood sheets that I’d liberated from a dumpster when they were renovating a local store. A few minutes pulling nails and unscrewing screws and I had my new roof decking cut to size and ready to install. But the wind wasn’t co-operating. My first attempt up the ladder holding a four-by-six parasail nearly Mary Poppinsed me into town.

I decked the roof a few days later and then installed aluminum drip edge and some tar paper (to make up for the holes in the plywood). I’d accumulated these over the years from the reuse building at the landfill and I sensed a sigh of relief on their part when they finally became part of a building project, however cheesy.

One note about tar paper: if you have any kind of a pitch on your roof it gets decently treacherous once you tar paper it. The paper is only stapled so it tends to want to slide free and dump you off the end of your roof as you walk on it. If you are going to shingle it, walking on it is pretty much a given. Also be sure to weigh it down immediately with bundles of shingles — an unexpected downdraft of wind can have most of it in the backyard pretty quickly. Trust me, I know.

The shingles were going to cost me about $16 a bundle and I needed around eight bundles, but luck was on my side when I went shopping. The store had eight bundles of special order, super-deluxe shingles that some weasel had ordered and not picked up. My shingles only ran me around 50 bucks. Let’s hear it for weasels!

I’ve shingled a few different places over the years so I figured doing one face of a porch roof would be a breeze. But either shingles weigh a lot more now than they used to or I’m a whole lot older than I feel because throwing a bundle on my shoulder and heading up a two-storey ladder was not how I remembered. In fact, I was pretty much winded about halfway up the ladder and deliberating whether I should press on or try to back down. I voted for down but that was trickier than expected and involved jettisoning the cargo as gingerly as possible. I came down the ladder with my tail between my legs and a whole new respect for roofers.

As it turns out I’m a half bundle kinda guy these days. It meant more trips up the ladder but they were easy trips with no surprise side trips.

Squatting down at the edge of a roof two storeys up didn’t seem like as much fun as it once did, either. I chose to do the first three rows in one slow pass from the ladder and then finished the rest of the roof from up top.

I now have the roof I’ve always wanted (on the top side, anyway) and it came in under budget and without major spinal injury. Now all I need is for someone to pitch some tongue-and-groove pine and I can finish the project.

Ian MacKenzie is a freelance writer and broadcaster who got this brilliant idea to move to the cottage.