Roof Repairs, Day 3
The original roofing job was quoted at around 5-6 hours. In retrospect, each of the three parts of the project probably took that much time.
On Saturday, the roofer arrived with a key piece of hardware: a "standoff." This is a U-shaped piece that attaches to the ladder and holds it away from the surface on which you are working. You may be able to see here that it was holding the ladder away from the roof so the roofer had room to actually work on the gutter.
The new gutter is white. Existing downspouts, which were in good shape and we re-used, are brown. I'm not troubled by the color mismatch. All that matters to me is that they work.
You can see the standoff at the top of the ladder better here.
After many hours of work, the gutter replacement is finished. The new gutter attaches to the existing downspout. The way it is secured to the upper deck is not great; however, it's easy to get at from the deck, and Lisa already has ideas on how she will build a new support to hold it in place and probably keep it from working loose in the inevitable future wind storm.
Here is a better view of how the upper down spout feeds to the lower (new) gutter, which in turn runs to another downspout. From there it leads to a small dry well that I dug some years ago. I probably need to dig it back out, muck it out, and reset it. We don't get a lot of rain, but when it does rain, it often is intense.
As the sun set, the roofer cleaned things up, packed his tools, and I paid him for his labor, labor and supplies in total ran to around $1,100, but it will be a bit less in the end, because he will take the supplies he bought from Lowe's but ended up not needing and return them, which should take them off of my Lowe's card. He bought more shingles than needed, but we kept the two bundles, because there appears to be a few spots on the lower roof that also may need new shingles. The lower roof is much easier to access and is significantly less pitched. Lisa says it should be pretty easy to get up there, and this saves us from having to go buy more singles for the patches where a few odd shingles blew away.
Speaking of blowing away, when we look at the pile of blown loose shingles that ended up in our yard and compare them to the colors of neighboring roofs, we conclude that not everything that landed in our yard is from our roof. There are a couple of houses whose roofs are in terrible shape. One of them has a huge tarp covering the roof presumably pending heavy repairs. To that extent, we may have gotten lucky.
Ironically, the final payment on the 12-months-no-interest purchase of the dishwasher just hit my account on Friday. As I mentioned, the supplies here are on a 6-months-no-interest payment plan, which is helpful given how much I've had to put on credit cards in the past month.
So for now (we hope), the worst of the repairs are done, I was able to pay for the larger part of them by liquidating an ESOP from XPO Logistics, former owner of the company for which I worked. XPO did pretty well, and my investment in XPO (which also led to owning some shares in RXO, yet another company that XPO spun off) was pretty good. I will, however, owe taxes on the long-term capital gain on that stock next year.
On Saturday, the roofer arrived with a key piece of hardware: a "standoff." This is a U-shaped piece that attaches to the ladder and holds it away from the surface on which you are working. You may be able to see here that it was holding the ladder away from the roof so the roofer had room to actually work on the gutter.
The new gutter is white. Existing downspouts, which were in good shape and we re-used, are brown. I'm not troubled by the color mismatch. All that matters to me is that they work.
You can see the standoff at the top of the ladder better here.
After many hours of work, the gutter replacement is finished. The new gutter attaches to the existing downspout. The way it is secured to the upper deck is not great; however, it's easy to get at from the deck, and Lisa already has ideas on how she will build a new support to hold it in place and probably keep it from working loose in the inevitable future wind storm.
Here is a better view of how the upper down spout feeds to the lower (new) gutter, which in turn runs to another downspout. From there it leads to a small dry well that I dug some years ago. I probably need to dig it back out, muck it out, and reset it. We don't get a lot of rain, but when it does rain, it often is intense.
As the sun set, the roofer cleaned things up, packed his tools, and I paid him for his labor, labor and supplies in total ran to around $1,100, but it will be a bit less in the end, because he will take the supplies he bought from Lowe's but ended up not needing and return them, which should take them off of my Lowe's card. He bought more shingles than needed, but we kept the two bundles, because there appears to be a few spots on the lower roof that also may need new shingles. The lower roof is much easier to access and is significantly less pitched. Lisa says it should be pretty easy to get up there, and this saves us from having to go buy more singles for the patches where a few odd shingles blew away.
Speaking of blowing away, when we look at the pile of blown loose shingles that ended up in our yard and compare them to the colors of neighboring roofs, we conclude that not everything that landed in our yard is from our roof. There are a couple of houses whose roofs are in terrible shape. One of them has a huge tarp covering the roof presumably pending heavy repairs. To that extent, we may have gotten lucky.
Ironically, the final payment on the 12-months-no-interest purchase of the dishwasher just hit my account on Friday. As I mentioned, the supplies here are on a 6-months-no-interest payment plan, which is helpful given how much I've had to put on credit cards in the past month.
So for now (we hope), the worst of the repairs are done, I was able to pay for the larger part of them by liquidating an ESOP from XPO Logistics, former owner of the company for which I worked. XPO did pretty well, and my investment in XPO (which also led to owning some shares in RXO, yet another company that XPO spun off) was pretty good. I will, however, owe taxes on the long-term capital gain on that stock next year.