neurotwitch

a brand new leak and carbon monoxide

The company we hired to do the roof started last week. Um, Thursday I think. Friday was way too cold to work and we expected Demetrius and his crew (crew, hah! One guy.) to show up bright and early on Saturday since it was going to be a good day for roofing. No show, no call. Nobody on Sunday. A call on Monday: Demetrius has the flu, got it last week. Almost over it, so he and Adrian (the crew) showed up on Tuesday to continue.

Lots of rotten fascia to replace, lots of old stuff to get off. They worked on the eastnorth side first, which is completely over the original house (as in 200 years of roof). They covered the roof with a tarp before leaving because it was due to rain Wednesday.

Rain it did. In our attic and into our bedroom. We had leaks where we never, ever had leaks before. On to our bed, the television, hardwood floor ... I am so damned glad Stanley had a reason to go upstairs and saw what was happening because usually we don’t go upstairs at all during the day. I don’t, anyway. While Stanley spread towels and looked for the source, I called and paged Demetrius. Who showed up fairly quickly to fix stuff. Seems that the crew had created a sort of dam with the gutter and didn’t overlap stuff or whatever, and the damned up water found a opening and started pouring into the attic (which is really a third floor and not really an attic).

While Stanley has been working on painting the bedroom, we hadn’t planned on doing the ceiling just yet. That’s changed—ugly brown stains all over the ceiling. Ack.

All went well Thursday, with about a third of the roof done. Today they worked on the west side. It’s above my office so it was very, very noisy but even so, I managed to get quite a bit of work done. The cat was fascinated with it all and kept running from window to window to watch. Which was ok except that the path leads over my keyboard. Pain in the ass cat.

Demetrius and Adrian covered the roof again before they left—it’s supposed to shower tonight. Stanley came down and said, “I think they covered the chimney.” He was peeking through the crawlspace ceiling to see how far along they’d gotten and noticed the blue of the top a lot higher than expected. So he went out and checked. Sure enough, the chimney is tarped. It’s a good thing Stanley noticed so we could turn off the furnace before our house was filled with carbon monoxide. Demetrius should’ve told us. I know it doesn’t matter much in the summer, but it’s December. Good thing it’s fairly warm tonight—it’s only supposed to go down to 40 degrees.

Tomorrow we’ll point out to Demetrius that if he kills us, he won’t get paid. We only paid $3,100 so far out of a total of $8,100-9,000 (depending on how many repairs have to be made). They have to finish the west side and then there’s the south roof, which is over the addition. Then put the gutters back up.

They are good about cleaning up each day, and are being careful about not smashing my plants. There are two trees we’ve been nursing since seedling status, a holly and a Japanese maple, and I would’ve been upset if they were damaged. And they are repairing stuff instead of just putting shingles over rotted wood, which is great.

I’m looking forward to having a new roof—we can finally paint the kitchen and fix the ceiling in our office without worrying about brown streaks down freshly painted surfaces during the first heavy rain. Will make the aggravation from the noise and the smell (from removing old tar from around the chimney) worth it.

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