For some reason I don’t feel complete without publishing a post on my many DIY projects. Case in point, we finished the apartment/garage roof weeks ago and I still have yet to post anything about it! Not that you’ve been dying to hear about my roofing experience but it’s kind of a funny story if you’re bored and want to listen…
We had two different roofers out to give us an estimate for both the apartment/garage roof and the house roof. Even though both estimates were fair, we decided we couldn’t shell out the cash needed for the labor (especially because we had to pay for a leak in the main water line which led to digging up the front yard and side yard, tearing out the neighbor’s arborvitae and soooo much added expense)… we basically wanted to take out the middle man and get our own subcontractors or we’d have to do it ourselves.
Obviously we wound up doing ourselves because 1. Its’ like NOBODY wants to work anymore and 2. If they do want to work “I don’t do roofs” is the first thing out of their mouths after they get asked “what type of work do you do?”
Anyway, I wound up doing the flatter side of the roof while the boyfriend roofed the steeper part. It took the two of us three days (and 20 minutes on a Friday night three days later – but more on that later…) and just over $1,300 in materials to do the roof. The best estimate we got was just over $2,500 so it was a $1,200 savings! So it was kind of a no-brainer. But let me tell you… THE HOUSE ROOF IS THE LAST ROOF I’M DOING. Although, I said that the last time I did my mom’s roof….
And even though I got some pretty cool videos from doing that roof… like the one below…mark my words… The last roof I will ever do will be the roof on the house because the potential to save over $3,000 doing it ourselves outweighs how much I hate doing roofs.
We wound up having to take a few days off of work to do the roof, which was only supposed to be a “three day weekend” roofing project, but because of threats of rain (which didn’t happen of course) we had to postpone tearing off the roof until the end of the weekend and taking off of work on a Monday and Tuesday to finish. Which if you know me I HATE taking days off work – we’re self employed so there are no paid sick or vacation days.
But Tuesday we weren’t able to finish because, well, we were just too damn tired to be honest with you.
So we went to work Wednesday morning and after a long day of siding a house, we were gung ho to get started and get the roof DONE by the time dark rolled around.
Can you see where this story is going? We didn’t get the roof done by dark. Shocker.
So while we we’re working on the roof and when I had ONLY three more runs of shingles to do I placed my gun down on the roof and OFF THE POPPED THE AIR HOSE. I was so lucky the goddamn thing didn’t hit me in the eye. It then proceeded to slither around the roof like a snake on steroids but I quickly grabbed it, disconnected it and we continued to roof with only one working gun -which is why we weren’t able to finish by dark.
At least my gun isn’t broken, jut the air hose.
So after we laughed off the air hose incident, because what else is there to do, we tried to finish the roof by the light of my iPhone but soon realized we were two feet short on ridge caps! Whaaaa… I won’t get into it, but long story short, the boyfriend and I have never used that brand of shingles and ridge caps before and wound up installing them 3/4″ smaller than supposed to be, so by the end of the pack we had lost 5′ of ridge. And we only had ONE pack of ridge caps.
It poured rain on Thursday so we weren’t able to finish the ridge until Friday night – which we wound up just hand nailing so we wouldn’t have to drag out the compressor, air hose and all the other goodies needed for roofing.
All in all it wasn’t the worst roofing experience but I’m really (really really) dreading doing the house roof.
But I’ll worry about that when the day comes. For now, I’m off to order my ready to assemble kitchen cabinets in a beautiful deep brown and supplies for concrete counters! Check back for how the assembly of and hanging the kitchen cabinets goes and how my DIY countertops come out!
