Our Journey as we chase the dream of sailing the world!
Turning this:
Into this:
Creates this:
We did 2 of those in the last 2 days. The tractor bucket made a great “ladder” to stand in and hold us at the perfect height. It also made clean up easy since all old shingles and cut scraps went straight into the bucket to be dumped in the garbage trailer for hauling away.
We’re slow, but we do good work!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
My journey for mental wellness continues. Ever since I was a young boy, church attendance has been a consistent part of my life. Except when illness, pain, or military duty kept me away, I’ve attended every week. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t go simply because I didn’t want to go.
I didn’t go today though. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I don’t feel up to it. Though not what you would normally think of when I say “illness,” my mental state (mental illness) kept me home today. This has happened before, but today is easier for me to explain why. Hopefully it is easier for some to understand.
With my PTSD I will often find myself having a moment of panic about the “what if’s” of a certain location. It’s happened at football games, restaurants, choir concerts, Thanksgiving Point, anywhere and everywhere, even at church.
What if a gunman comes running through that door? What if a car starts running people over? What if that bus explodes? What if someone grabs one of the kids? What if some kids come through with knives? What if… ? What if… ? What if…?
My own thought processes tell me those thing won’t happen. Or at least that the odds of them happening are so small that I shouldn’t be bothered by them at all. The same thoughts that YOU have about these things are usually what I have too. But sometimes the PTSD is stronger than that, and reason goes out the window.
But sometimes those things DO happen. The attacks with knives, cars, guns, bombs… those do happen at times, and so it makes me even more prone to the moments of panic.
And last week it did again. I assume if you are reading this that you know about the shooting at the Texas church house. 26 dead, countless affected. Families torn asunder. Unimaginable pain and grief.
Because of the regularity with which I’m at church services (where as I’m almost never in restaurants or football games), church is one of the more common panic inducing thoughts/locations that I have. So when it does happen in real life, even if its a thousand miles away, I’m not really in a good mental position to head back to my own church house.
After a night filled with more nightmares, I made the conscious decision not to go to church today. I don’t ever “know” when a moment of panic will occur, but for some reason I just felt more vulnerable than normal today. Is that excusable? Does that make me less faithful of a Christian? Will my friends think less of me for admitting it? Is it as acceptable to stay home because of mental illness as it is for a physical illness? Would you judge me more harshly (in your opinion of me) for this slip in my church attendance?
Happy Veteran’s Day to all veterans out there! I wish you the best and thank you for your service and sacrifices.
I’ve been typing out a now fairly lengthy post on Veteran’s Day and what it means to me to be a veteran. Much like my previous PTSD post from last weekend, I’m not going to post it either.
Most of it was all pride and glory and sacrifice and nobility: like most of the stuff you read getting passed around on Facebook. And all of that is true and fair.
But then I also typed up a long list of how being a veteran also meant a lifetime of pain, wrangling your conscience about taking another human life, dealing with the betrayal of a “battle buddy” who hurt you, spending the rest of your life trying not to become a “22 a day” statistic, and on and on. There was just as large a host of negative aspects of military service as there was positive one.
There are a LOT of veterans out there for whom the negatives far outweigh the positives, and so I decided not to post my flag-waving, chest thumping, USA chanting post. I don’t want them reading that post and saying, “that isn’t what it was like for me” and feeling like their service wasn’t sufficient, or their sacrifice wasn’t meaningful, or that they somehow “did it wrong”.
Instead I’ll be happy to just wish all my veteran friends who see this a happy Veteran’s Day, and my hope that you are happy on all days after this as well.
Take care of each other out there…
I wrote last week about my shipping container woes (Connex). Here is an update on that.
I went in and met with the Bluffdale City Code Enforcement Officer, Ben Henrie. He’s a very nice guy who seemed willing to find a way to make things work for me. I was impressed with that. He discussed with me several options for how I could make this work within existing code.
He had printed out a picture of what another resident had done with their connex. This person had put a pitched roof over the top of it using what appeared to be pre-built trusses.
I kind of laughed at that because the connex’s are already water proof and so the roof was superfluous. It also did NOTHING to hide the sides of the container (the part that is visible) from the neighbors, and it was the appearance that made the container not work with city code. All adding a rood did was add to what the neighbor saw, not hide it at all. But it moved the container into a category of a building, and that fit that code just fine.
I don’t want to do this. It is needlessly expensive and provides no benefit other than to satisfy arbitrary rules imposed by government. Also, I might in the future want to bring my container from MO, and would probably then use them as the walls of a “barn” and put a roof over the middle. I don’t want to put up one roof and then in a few years tear it off to build another one.
If, as Ben and a co-worker (Pam) were telling me, the only real issue is that the connex shouldn’t be visible to neighbors, I would be happy to get it covered. My dad has a plethora of 2×6’s from a fence he de-constructed, and I would use them to make an edging around the top that I’d hang something from to hide the container. That would be something like a tarp or visqueen. They kind of frowned at that, but didn’t sound like they had a reason it wouldn’t fit the code. It would hide the appearance of the container.
Ben did say that another way around things was to put a “sight blocking fence” around it. It was here I think that he emphasized that the real issue is that it is a visual nuisance to the neighbors and that if it can’t be seen than it is perfectly acceptable. Heaven knows I don’t want to build a fence around one, so this option won’t work for me either.
With the issue being sight, this should be acceptable. I didn’t mention it, and neither did they, but I don’t see how they could object to it. I don’t want to do this, but it is doable.
When we left we didn’t really have a good answer from Ben’s boss on what I could do to make a connex fit into the code. The boss wasn’t there and couldn’t be reached. They were having a staff meeting later that day however, with all persons who would have input on this including “the head man” who would have final say on these issues. I was told by Ben and Pam that they’d bring it up and see what was determined.
I reached out to Ben today to ask how that meeting went and what I can do. He said that they came to the conclusion that I CAN have a connex. He said as long as it is only one, and that it is in the back yard, that it is allowed under the current code. I asked for something in writing from them to that effect. He sent me this: “After my staff meeting it has been determined by the planning department that one container placed in the rear of the property will not constitute open storage under the current interpretation of the city code.”
Ben did tell me over the phone that the code was likely to change in the next 5 years or so. He wasn’t sure how it would change, but said that I shouldn’t have a problem. Apparently all the decision makers were present, and they agreed I’d be fine.
After posting about my woes finding a container, I got a message from someone telling me that they sell them in SLC and to give them a call. So with my good news in hand, I called. They do indeed have a variety of them available that I could have delivered in about a week. \
I’ve found me a connex. So I looked at finances, and the only woe at this point is affording one. I don’t exactly have thousands of dollars lying around. In fact, because I’m trying to pay for a home that no longer exists (rather than just declare bankruptcy), I’m decidedly upside down financially.
So… now what? Do I leave thousands of dollars of stuff out to be snowed on, stolen, or rusted? Or do I spend thousands I don’t have to protect that stuff AND to help clean up both the yard and the garage/driveway here at my parents place? I spend a couple thousand I don’t have in one situation, and potentially waste/ruin several thousand more if I don’t.
That’s the rock and hard place I’m trying to work out today.
Any good ideas?