Thursday, February 11, 2021

House to Home, Volume 17 - All Trussed Up

First, a story.  At about 2pm on Monday, December 21st I came home to give Roxie her meds.  Normally I park in my "second" driveway which is on the side of the house furthest from all the construction, but I could see as I came up the road that it was full of cars so I squeezed in at the bottom of my real driveway.  When I got out of the car everyone stopped working and turned to look at me.  Bryan came from the back of the house and said something like, "Come back here, I have something to show you."  I immediately got nervous, because LITERALLY everyone stopped what they were doing and just watched me.  I had a tiny heart-stopping moment wondering what had gone horribly wrong but when I got to the back of the house and looked where Bryan was pointing, I saw this:

WHHAAAAAAAT?????  I said, "Where's my chimney?"  Bryan said, "Surprise, this is from your mother."  Holy crudballs, guys -- those boys are putting a new shingled roof on my house!  I planned at some point down the road to replace the metal roof so it matched what we're putting on the new build, but that was going to be Phase Two.  Probably five years from now.  So I was totally stunned by the surprise.  And EVERYONE KNEW THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN EXCEPT ME!  Pam, the lone female on Bryan's crew, told me she had to run an errand at lunch and she raced back because they didn't know what time I would get home and she didn't want to miss the surprise.

Here's a comparison I made for my mom a couple days later from the vantage point of my thinking chair:

You can't quite tell but the metal was plain old galvanized so it would have looked weird next to all the new black shingles.  And the chimney was useless.  When the house was built back in the 1980s it had a woodstove between the dining and living rooms and the chimney pipe ran up through the back of the guest room closet.  At some point they removed the stove because it created way too much heat but they left the chimney.  Now it's gone!

And remember this picture from my last post that I said would be funny later?

I did have a fleeting thought that it was a bit early for the shingles to arrive but LITTLE DID I KNOW this pile is the shingles for my surprise roof!  Thanks, mom - that was very sneaky and I still can't believe it.

Getting back to the 21st, it was also the day trusses started going up (discounting the baby trusses over the shed roof that went up on the 15th.


There was some talk of hiring a crane truck to lift everything up and over the wall, but they went with manually lifting each one and stuffing them through my soon-to-be bedroom window.  Or between the studs next to the window.  Something like that.

I also took this picture from the hallway window but I cannot remember why.  I'm thinking it was the first day scaffolding was set up in this location.

Things were looking different by mid-day on the 22nd.  Here are the views from inside, first from the guest room window and then from my bathroom.


The roofing boys have moved to the front of the house and this is the view looking out my new massive window by the kitchen.

I'm going to be cleaning that up for years.  Here's the view of the scaffolding through the upstairs hallway window again.


I sent that picture to my mom and she asked if someone had spilled crackers.  I had ZERO idea what she was talking about until I looked closely - those round orange things do indeed look like Ritz crackers!

Since we're fascinated by that scaffolding, here it is from my second driveway.

Also in the picture is a giant pile of crappy metal roofing, and the black thing to the right is the back end of their truck.  One roofer boy is on the roof, standing just about where my skylight used to be, and another one is outside my living room door, which is the location of the only outside power outlet.  Long extension cords have been running from that spot for the past couple of months.

Here's the front view of the tower as those trusses go up.

And here's the view from the back yard, with new shingles on one side and new trusses on the other.

Living in the middle of a construction zone/storage unit is certainly not conducive to creating a pile of original art holiday cards so my 2020 card was a digital masterpiece mostly delivered via Facebook.  On the 23rd I emailed it to a couple of friends who are non-Facebookers and for the sake of posterity I feel I should add it here.

Yessirree, that's a beauty.  So much has changed in the last two months.  In fact, the "before" picture in my comparison view up above is the very first picture I used for Volume 1 of this home reno series.  We've only got one more post to go before the new year.

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