Sunday, July 24, 2011

Sneak Peak

This is the old roof. It was so dried out that our inspector was able to snap one of the roof shingles in half without any effort (they should be bendy).


The roofers started about a week and a half late due to a really rainy week, which is why Nate only saw the ripped off roof and not the finished. They started on a day when Nate was at Florida Southern doing work and when he came home, the roofers had ripped off a section of shingles and put tar paper over the existing tar paper. This was unfortunate since the whole point of this process was to inspect the sub roof and replace any compromised areas. Even though the roofers assured him that the roof was solid, after talking with the boss and showing the contract that said they were going to rip off the preexisting tar paper, Nate convinced the roofers to rip off the rest of the tar paper and if they found any issues, they would go back and rip off the new tar paper they just put on.

After this first rough patch, Nate developed a pretty good relationship with the roofers. Not surprisingly, they found a lot of compromised board on the rest of the roof like here over the front door.



Another little issue is the little triangle you can see above the front door. It is there to divert rain water away from dumping on your head as you walk out the front door. Unfortunately, on the right side as you look at it, it diverts the water into the house and there was quite a bit of water damage there. To fix this, we contemplated taking the triangle off, but since this is a historic house, it isn't as simple as just taking it off. The historic panel has to approve the removal. This wouldn't have been an issue if  we could locate a picture that showed the original house without the triangle.

Nate spent the better part of a day trying to locate such a picture, and although he wasn't successful, he did find some cool stuff. The first cool thing that he found was a sister house to ours across town.

This house was built in 1937 (ours in 1925) and as you can see, has some slight differences to it but the same overall design. Nate talked with the current tenants and the owner of the house and they had no idea that the same house existed across town. It was apparently built by the original owners of our house because they loved it so much but had to move across town (I'm not quite sure of the logic of that....) Also, you'll notice that this house was built during the depression which is quite odd. I would like to go in and see the interior. Nate got a quick tour and there are differences but they are apparently improvements to our design so I want to see what they did.

The second cool thing that Nate found came from our neighbors. They had some really old photos of the original owners of their house and in the background you can see our house. The pictures just happened to be taken as our house was being built.



This is the driveway side of the house and you can see the subsiding going on and if you look carefully, you can tell the triangle is not on the house at this stage. Based on this and the sister house having a different design over the front door, we are pretty sure the triangle isn't original. This wasn't quite enough to easily convince a panel to remove it so we decided to ice and water shield that corner and the roofers promised to make sure to take every precaution so that there aren't any more problems there.

Back to the area that they had already tar papered. The roofers did end of ripping it off and lo and behold, guess what they found.


A very large compromised area (they had to replace a 5' x 7' section which you can see in the pic). They also found an area that was so rotted that there was no wood anymore. As in, one person steps there an through the roof they go. Needless to say, I'm very happy Nate made them rip it off.

One last fun antidote. The roofers claimed that they wouldn't get the roof on the pool side stripped before Nate left. To try to get them to finish so he could see the sub-roof, Nate told them that if they did get it stripped he would get them a case of Corona. Guess what. It was stripped with plenty of time to spare. Oh what men will do for some beer.

This is all we've seen of the roof. I'm excited to see the final product in a couple of weeks. Until then, we are just hoping that it looks as good as we are told.

Weekend Bloggy Reading

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