Friday, September 25, 2009

Garage Roof Update #1 (I am all that is man)

In the last lap of my race against winter I have decided to re-roof our detached garage.  The inspector that we used during the house purchasing process made it clear that the old roof was leaking and needed to be replaced.  Luckily I have a friend named Bob (no, not Bob the Builder) who did roofing for many years and is willing to lend a hand and show me the ins and outs of roofing.

So far I have:

1)  Sourced the roofing materials.  I did a bit of shopping around and it became clear that Stoneway Roofing was the best place to buy all the materials.  They have great prices, good quality materials, and are very knowledgeable and helpful.  The total bill for 450 sqr ft of 30 year PABCO shingles (nice achetechural type), plywood sheet, nails, vents, starter shingles, etc, etc.. is ~$650.

When I ask Bob if I should just buy the stuff at HomeDepot he said: "You have TWO choices: Stoneway or Stoneway. That's it. If you buy any other shit I'll make you return it with a pink dress on."

2)  Cleared the roof.. The old roof was sooo covered in mystical backyard sludge.  It was horrible.  Also, many of the overgrown trees and bushes were resting on the roof.  It was a mess.  I spent about 4 hours cutting all of the branches back (don't tell my mom that I used a chainsaw while standing on a roof) and shoveling the scum off the roof.  I should say about 1000lb of stuff hit the ground (branches + sludge).  I tried to get pictures.. kinda hard to see the extent of the change


Before


After


3)  Torn off the old roof.  Luckily a co-worker of mine had a roofing spade that I could borrow.  This is a special tool used for tearing up roofing materials.  Bob came over at 5pm on Thursday evening.  I had a cooler full of beer, coke, and bottled water waiting.  That's what every roof job needs.. a wet bar.

Once we started tearing up the roof we found that there where actually 3 roof surfaces over the garage.  The people before had been cheap/lazy and not tore off the old roofs before laying down the new stuff.  The bottom layer was the original 98 year old cedar shingles.  After ~3 hours of intense labor we had the 3 roof surfaces torn off.  4000-6000lb of material came off.




Bob was very good at using the roofing spade.. he had a technique that looked easy, but was actually very difficult once I tried it.  Bob is master roof-er tear-er off-er.

 I am not sure what I was thinking.. .but I didn't really consider the problem of disposing of all this material.  I now have to figure out the best way to get rid of 2-3 tons of waste.  This could actually end up costing me more than it did to buy all the new materials.  I have to weigh the cost of having a company come and take care of the waste vs taking 5-6 trips to the dump.....

....... to be continued.

2 comments:

  1. Looks like someone needs to setup a garbage can.

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  2. how ridiculous that they left the old roof on! Thinking of you in a pink dress makes me smile!

    ReplyDelete