The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining. John F. Kennedy

"The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining."  JFK 

Sept. 3 -- I just returned from a few days away from the construction zone to enjoy the long Labor Day holiday weekend.  I would like to think that we've hit the half-way mark on this project, but when you're in the uber-zen mode, what is time anyway?

Labor Day is supposed to be the last official weekend of summer and ushers in the coming of fall.  With record-breaking heat, it looks like summer is going out kicking and screaming.  

Whenever I escape the construction zone for a few days, it is always amazing to see what has been going on in my absence.  There have been advances on two fronts.

 First, the members of the framing crew were still working on the siding and almost all windows have now been installed in the new construction of the house.  The doors have yet to appear on site.

This next shot shows the three windows in the new master bathroom with cedar shingles (this picks up the theme of the cedar shingles on the shed dormer to the left) and to the right are the three windows in the dormer that is the new master bedroom.  Below the master bedroom windows you can see the three windows in the stairwell that leads to the basement.  (Note to self -- ask the architect what the deal is about windows that come in threes).

The next sequence of shots are close-ups of the installation of the siding

The second front where there has been great progress is shown in this last photo as a preview -- you can see a few members of the roofing crew, to which we now turn our attention.

The pitch on the roof of the original house is, to put it in simple terms, insanely steep.  You seriously need to be a thrill-seeker / daredevil type to want to get on the top of this roof -- not for the faint of heart or me.  Yet, it was amazing to see the members of the roofing crew do their work -- some of them wore safety harnesses so that they were tethered to the roof, but others simply wore a safety harness that wasn't attached to anything!

As I mentioned in a previous post, in 1903 the original roof was constructed with wooden rafters and then cedar shingles were applied. Over the years three layers of shingles were applied.   Today, roof joists form the rafters and plywood sheeting covers the rafters, roof paper is applied and then the composite shingles go on top of the paper.  The roofers had to remove the current layers of shingles and scrape all the way down to the original rafters.  

This next photos shows one of the roofers (with no safety harness!) scraping the original roofing materials down to the bare slats over the rafters.

Here is a view of the roof debris piling up before it is shoved off the side of the roof to land below in a tarp so that it can be carried off to the construction dumpster.

This photo provides some context:  The steep pitch of the roof, the crew balancing on the top, the roofing supplies truck with a telescopic conveyor belt that sends up sheets of plywood, roofing shingles and the like.

The next few shots give a general sense of the process involved..

 

The members of the roofing crew work until well after 6:00pm, and they make sure to cover the exposed parts of the roof in the event of showers.

At this rate, a new roof should cover the entire house before the week is over!