Today’s Project
This is the west side of the roof over the front (north) door of the house. This roof leaked last winter/spring, and I bet that you can understand why. And since winter is coming, I thought I better go ahead and get this fixed, NOW! I’d have done it long ago, but the projects that gave us living space have all seemed more important up until now.
The Demo
Thankfully all of the needed supplies and tools were here already. Dad reroofed almost the entire house a few years ago and had plenty of extra packages of shingles just waiting for me to use.
The hardest part was taking those old shingles off. As worn out and rotten as they look, they were still solidly attached to the roof. The shingles in the open were fine, but that small section under the overhang… those were rough. As that space disappeared it became almost impossible to get the nails out. And the space to grab onto them was almost too small as well.
It took about an hour to get that portion cleaned out on both sides of the door. Truth be told, I did end up leaving a portion of the old shingles on the East side. No amount of pulling or mangling could get it released since that upper portion of house was built on top of the already shingled entry way. But since it is well hidden it won’t be an eye sore, and being covered the way it is there is no way it will cause a water problem.
Roofing
When the demolition was complete we found that the tar paper was actually in really good shape. On one side we left it in place, and on the other I did lay some new tar paper to cover a spot we ripped it while tearing shingles off.
As mentioned above, the shingles under the eaves had been put on prior to the eaves being built when the house was under construction 35+ years ago. That made nailing down the shingles then easy to do. Not so much today though. There is no way to get a nail gun nor hammer into that space to secure the shingles with nails.
Instead, we glued them down. After nailing each shingle down as much as we could, we used roofing tar to glue them in place. No shingle is ONLY held by tar though. We were sure to not to put any partial pieces in under that area that couldn’t be nailed. Every shingle has at least 4 nails in it out in the open, and then some tar under the eave to glue that portion down. I hope it will be just fine.
It only took about an hour of work to get the new shingles on. It took more than a couple of actual hours due to the breaks I kept taking for my back and feet (ached terribly from standing on the ladder). I knew this was going to cause a fair amount of pain, so I asked for help. I guess my Elder’s Quorum (church group) dropped the ball on me. C’est la Vie.
Siding
If you look closely at the photo you’ll notice that the fascia was never installed around this door. Dad, who worked in construction his entire life (He was a project manager for building hospitals, shopping malls, and an LDS temple) never got around to finishing that small project.
So, after roofing, Julie and I decided that it was high time that it got done. Again, all the supplies were here already.
Julie actually took over this portion of the project. My back was killing me by the time we got to this point, so she found the items and started measuring and cutting. She can do it all (must be part of her Cyborg programming).
(I wrote the previous paragraph while she was indeed out working and I recuperated. After about 45 min I went out again and found she hadn’t put up any of the soffit or fascia, so I proceeded to do it myself while she went and got kids from school and ran them to/from various locations. I left that paragraph in the post just to rub it in a little bit to her – a good natured laugh we were having).
More to Come
I wish that we were done with this, but it turns out there are 2 bay windows that Dad failed to re-roof as well a few years back. So those are also on our to-do list this week.
