UP ON THE HOUSETOP

Yesterday morning I awoke to the strange sound of a scratching and rattling against the roof of our house. Had the squirrels grown to mammoth proportions and rented some kind of heavy equipment? Was it a team of reindeer? Was a fat man in a little red suit sliding down my chimney (and into my furnace) even as I sat there blinking against the sun light coming through the window? I turned to my partner…

“What the …?”

He listened, head cocked. “Roofers.”

I couldn’t believe it – it was, truly, a miracle.

For two years we’ve been trying to get someone to put a new roof on our house. Last summer, we had three separate roofers come out, measure, give us an estimate and then never ever call us back. When they were here, they would sound as though they would be ready to return, air hammers in hand, within the week, but they were never to be heard from again. We would leave messages on their answering machines, begging, pleading, just to be told whether they were coming or not. No response.

Giving up on the conventional method of just calling a roofer and expecting him to show up and oh, say, ROOF, we decided to go another route. My mother has a friend with whom she often exchanges work, so she worked out a deal with him this past summer to put our roof on. He came out, measured, and assessed the situation sometime in early August, and let us know up front that he had a lot of work on his plate and that it would be September or October before he would be able to return.

No problem. As long as the new shingles were on the house before it got seriously cold outside, we would be fine with that — September or October would be just peachy.

See, putting the new roof on is just Step One in a long, complicated Master Plan which we would like to complete before Christmas and which must be completed before the beginning of February. The roof leaks – badly. We’ve known for quite some time that we needed a new one (thus all of the calls to the roofers), but have had what seems to be a ridiculous time trying to get someone to come and actually do the work. This summer, whenever it rained it would, literally, rain in our house – sometimes torrentially. Twice now my partner has crawled up on the roof (which I don’t like one bit) and installed heavy plastic over the bits that leak the worst. This helps tremendously – until the first time we have a windy day. They we just have shredded plastic streamers ineffectually hanging off of the back of our house. Sure, it’s festive, but it does nothing to keep out the water.

The one positive aspect of our water damage is that it is mostly confined to one area in our upstairs hallway. That part of the ceiling needs to come down entirely, which is Step Two in the Master Plan anyway. There is a small, square hatch in that part of the ceiling which leads to the attic. It is too small to actually get anything up to the attic, and a ladder must be retrieved from outside before it is possible to climb up there. As soon as the new roof is on, we are going to install a much larger drop-down ladder so that easy access to the attic is possible. So, that nasty water damaged ceiling would be cut out anyway, whether it had been damaged or not.

The next step in the Master Plan is to insulate the attic and install a floor. There is not one shred of insulation up there at the moment, a fact that I find appalling. With energy costs being what they are, we can probably pay for this particular renovation within the first year through the savings we will accumulate on our heating and cooling bills.

Then, of course, we start the Great Rearranging. That part has already, to some extent, begun. We tore down our microscopic, rusty shed about a month ago and put up a much larger structure. Since that time, we’ve been rearranging and purging the accumulations in the basement, trying to make enough room to construct the very sturdy shelves which will make organization in that space optimal. Of course, everything has to be moved in order to put the shelves where they need to go…

Ah, attic space – I can’t wait until we have access to ours. We calculated the square footage of our house a few months ago, and I suddenly realized why everything felt so cramped – our house is much smaller than it initially appears. From the outside, it looks big, but on the inside it is not.

Part of its illusory appearance comes from the fact that it is very tall. It is two and a half stories, and the first story is raised quite a bit off the ground. This is, perhaps, why the roofers never come back. Though the roof is not all that large and has simple lines, it is very steep and the fall to the yard below is somewhat intimidating. But of course, the Master Plan begins with having a new roof on the house – there is no point in insulating a space only to have it soaked with the next heavy rain.

So the roofer was supposed to come in September or October… of course, we still haven’t seen him. Every week he said that he would be there the next week… but then it rained… and then it was dear hunting season… and then he had to go out of town… and then he just didn’t show up and didn’t offer any excuse.

I talked to several friends of mine, and this sort of dynamic seems to be epidemic among many types of contractors. They are apparently notorious for promising delivery dates and then not delivering, or telling the client that they will be there at so and such time and then just not being there. Also, I hear that it is typical that they don’t call to give any explanation, or just to notify the client that they can do something else with their day other than wait around for the contractor who is never going to show up. We have developed a theory that they are, en masse, taught this uniquely annoying business practice at whatever trade school or secret society they attend since it seems to be so universally common.

In the meantime, my partner had been rearranging his schedule every weekend so that he could be here to help the roofer in the event that he actually showed up. He had, in fact, started to really consider whether or not he could put the roof on himself. Of course, he had none of the conventional equipment, but he could swing a hammer pretty well. It would take him much longer, but if he did a section at a time every day that he could be home, it could be done in about two weeks… which was better than not at all….

Eventually, my mother (who knew the Invisible Roofer) got sick of waiting for him and started asking around to other people she knew to see if she could find someone who would actually show up. As a friend of mine pointed out, we needed to find one that was “hungry,” i.e. who need the work and needed the money.

In a few days, she found one. He had worked for his uncle for many years, and after his uncle retired, he struck out on his own. Though experienced at the job, he had only been running his own business for a few months and was really interested in finding enough work to keep him busy. He still had another job on the side for those times when his schedule wasn’t filled.

Perfect.

Within two days of being contacted, he was at our house bright and early taking measurements. (We took this as a good sign – the last roofer had taken more than a month to actually come look at the house in the first place.) We didn’t even need to be here, much less have my partner help, so that gave us more freedom to organize the rest of our time. He gave us the ambiguous time-frame of “either this weekend or next,” which though we’d heard before, we were willing to give the new guy the benefit of the doubt.

Last weekend we didn’t see him, but it was also raining pretty consistently. No problem. Then, bright and early yesterday morning, there he was, nail gun in hand, scaling the ladders and pounding away at the roof.

He’s up there right now, in fact. They completed the back of the house (which is where all of the leaking was occurring) yesterday and returned today to finish the front. By tonight, miracles of miracles, we should actually have a new roof on our house.

On a good note, the estimated price for the roof decreased exponentially the more we weighed our options. The first disappearing roofer who assessed the job gave us a quote of more than five thousand dollars. Ouch.

Of course, if we bought the supplies ourselves, it would probably be cheaper. At the local hardware store, we found a sample of the ones we liked. They were a forty-year shingle and matched the blue trim that we had painted on our house a few years back. Unfortunately, blue was an “odd” color, so we would have to special order them. Also, because they were of higher quality then their general shingle, they would cost about $60.00 a square. This, of course, was still way cheaper than the average roofer had quoted us for supplies, so at least it would save some money.

Then we had the bright idea to shop around and compare prices on shingles. My mother told us about a place she had heard of which sold seconds from the Owens-Corning plant and which she had heard good things about. To our great excitement (Do you know how strange it feels to be excited about shingles?), they had the exact shingles we had looked at, in stock, in abundance, for a third of the price. Hot damn – there is something to be said for wanting an “odd” color.

All in all, the whole job is ending up costing us about 10% of what we had initially expected to pay, which is a very good thing. Of course, if the roofer had never showed up, which we were beginning to fear, none of the “savings” would have mattered a whole lot.

But, he’s here now, banging away overhead as I write this. Step One in our Master Plan to Take Over Our Living Space is nearly complete…