Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

It got just barely cold enough last night for the rain to turn into a little bit of snow.

( Still )

Yesterday afternoon, Lisa and I went to Lowe's price what a ladder long enough to reach the upper roof would cost. It's not cheap. Lisa will also need to dig out the safety harness and the rope we used on the house in Mehama, and will need to figure a way to get a line over the roof so that we can tie it to a tree on the opposite side of the house. Only then will Lisa feel secure in going up there and fixing the join and probably making other corrections to that gutter.

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.

( Replacing the Gutters )

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.

I have hired a roofer who says he can replace the roughly 10' x 30' section of missing shingles from the upper roof, fix/replace the failing flashing along the eves on that same roof line, and replace the failed rain gutter on the opposite side of the room. Initially he projected this as a one day job, but things did not go quickly.



On Thursday morning, we got some unexpected rain and these snow flurries, although no snow stuck. I figured the roofer would scrub for today, but the rain stopped mid-morning around the time he arrived. He assessed the situation and made a shopping list of supplies that he was going to need. Unlike some larger firms, he doesn't buy the supplies and then mark them up, so in this case what he did was go to Lowe's and have them call me. Using my Lowe's credit card, I could get six months interest-free financing for the nearly $500 in supplies, which seemed good to me.

( Guttered )

After working on this for much of the afternoon, the roofer concluded that his ladder was not long enough and that he would come back the next day with a long enough roof for him to finish the gutter and to start on the shingles and flashing on the opposite side of the house.

A couple of days ago, Lisa went up to inspect a place on the eves of the west side of the upper floor of the house, where things are not as they should be.

( Eve Issues )

After Lisa came down and we put the ladder away, she decided to look at the roof of the lower floor of the house, which she can reach via the balcony of the upper floor.

( Shingle Repairs )

It's a good thing she found and repaired this roof issue on Saturday, due to the thunderstorm that blew through yesterday afternoon.

With the roof now dried out from the storms earlier in the week, Lisa went up on the roof to inspect the three plumbing vents and to make repairs as needed.

( Leaking Gaskets )

I'm grateful that Lisa is this handy with these sorts of repairs. Most of the roof here is much less steep than, nor is it as high as the roof up in Mehama. However, the roof on the second floor is nowhere near as easy to access as is the lower floor, and while Lisa does have the safety harness and rope from her work on the house in Mehama, she has as yet not figured out a place where she feels safe attaching the safety line. She is still thinking about it, though.

Lisa left me a message this afternoon to report the good news that the contractor's workers showed up with a cherry-picker lift today ("worth its weight in gold," one of the workers told Lisa) and repaired the wind damage to the fascia. Because they were able to re-use some of the old material, they'll knock $75 off the final price. We got away rather lightly, I think; the total job will end up costing less than $900 and there was no other damage to the wood underneath the fascia. Lisa faunched slightly over the cherry-picker lift, saying how much easier the roof work in Mehama would have been with that equipment.

Lisa also reported that it's snowing today in Fernley. That's fine as long as it doesn't snow on April 21 when I'm driving the moving van full of furniture up there.

While I was home in Fernley this weekend, Lisa pointed out to me an issue that needs resolving sooner, not later. During the last-but-one windstorm, a portion of the fascia (the facing along the roof eves) blew off the upper portion of the west side of the roof.

( Pictures of the Damage )

If we were in Oregon, I would have been on the phone to the contractor today. As it is, we do need to get this fixed, but the urgency is slightly less than in rainy Oregon. We saw with Lisa's father's house what happens when the fascia goes missing — the wood rots and then water starts blowing in under the eves. Fernley gets a lot less rain, so we're less worried about this, but it's something that needs fixing relatively soon.

Lisa says she's tired of going up on roofs and isn't willing to touch this one.

Lisa says that we've completed everything she set out to accomplish during my trip up here this month, so anything else we accomplish in the remaining days is a bonus. She has decided for now to not put down any White Goo on the sections we covered already and to instead concentrate on the rest of the north roof.

( Next Steps )

Something not so obvious is that the areas of roof with roof fabric and/or roof goop have considerably better footing (once dry) than the basic shingle roof. I would have thought the opposite, but Lisa assures me that it's much easier walking on the treated sections. Also, even without the roof fabric, the goo makes the shingles stick together and hold up better. So her plan is to apply the Gray Goo directly to the sections of the west end that she's managed to clear, concentrating on some obvious gaps, like these areas with the rotten shingles. It won't be as good as the full-blown three-layer treatment (fabric + two types of goo) on the east end, but it's much better than nothing at all, and we just don't have time to go through the full treatment on this end. Preserving what we can here should make it easier to come back when we have time again and can take the time to lay down lath to which the roof fabric can be attached.

After lunch this afternoon, Lisa made a brief rooftop expedition to determine whether it was safe to risk moving the ladders. It was, so as the sun started to break through the clouds, she decided to take a shot at moving them.

( 45 minutes later... )

This job may seem simple on the surface, but it took the better part of an hour to complete, including kitting-up and tearing-down time at the ends.

Late Saturday afternoon, with heavy clouds cutting the heat, Lisa kitted up and went up the ladder with the plan to pour two more gallons of Gray Goo, expecting to get the newly-fabric-covered section completely covered.

While pouring the first gallon, it started to rain just a little bit. This isn't good. The Roof Goop is water-soluble until it dries completely. Fortunately, the rain was very light and lasted only a few minutes. Unfortunately, it made the roof that much more slippery, and that would prove to be important later.

Lisa poured the goop out and laboriously spread it over the remaining sections that she'd covered a few days ago, and also tried to get a second coat over areas she'd done yesterday. The first gallon went okay, as did most of the second. The second should have been easier because she could stand on the ladder for some of the time she was spreading it; however, trouble was ahead.

( Why You Must Have Safety Lines on That Roof )

( Roof Gooping Result )

Today it's very overcast and threatening-looking, but the weather forecast shows little chance of rain. A pity, really. For us, it would be a great day for there to be bright sun and light breezes to cure that roof surface.

Lisa is trying to figure out what to do next. There is still a gap of uncovered roof. You can see it between the ladder and the newly-gooped sections. To apply the roof fabric and then the goop means moving the ladders. But the newly-gooped section still needs an overcoat. Either we move the ladders and do the fabric and gray goop on the "gap," then the white goop there, then move the ladders back and finish the just-gray-gooped section, or else we white-goop the section she just did, wait a day, and go to work on the "gap." The problem is time, or lack of it. I leave next Saturday, and that doesn't leave many more days, since it's not possible to get a lot done on any particular day.