Through the Roof Rain

The beginning . . . of something . . .
The beginning . . . of something . . .

From the outset of our acquisition of it, the small, eighty-year-old, Botetourt County farmhouse needed attention. I mean, the electrical system was faulty and downright dangerous, plumbing ills included sewage seeping into the yard, and the cantankerous oil furnace was completely shot. Furthermore, window sills and door jambs were rotten, and the resident colony of mice had industriously chewed holes in cabinets and trim. Like I said, there was plenty to do.

Lots of projects, as you know, can be shifted “to the back burner,” but we had one issue that refused to be pushed aside for long: a leaky roof. You know, drip drip drip from various spots during all but the briefest of showers. And it was obvious that the process had been a long time in the making; cursory inspection revealed extensive rot throughout the roof sheathing and on into the rafters below.

So yeah, we had to rebuild the roof. Not armed with the financial resources to pay someone to do it, yet having an enormous amount of naive ambition and energy, we  proceeded to dive into the project. My then-not-yet-long-suffering wife and I would do it ourselves.

Through the production of some crude sketches, not the mention the gnashing of mental gears, we decided to build the new roof above the old one; the ridge of the new roof would be six feet above the existing one. This would require, among much else, extending upward the existing walls of the house, tearing through the current roof as necessary.

Building the new roof above the old one would accomplish the goals of not only having a solid, non-leaky roof but would also provide us a full second story instead of a cramped half of one. We planned to keep the old roof -or much of it anyway- in place during construction of the new one to use like scaffolding to stand on while installing the new rafters, etc. Not to mention to help keep the house still somewhat enclosed. After all, we were still living there throughout the project. We’d tear out the remains of the old roof when the new one was complete, and we’d build an inside stairway (didn’t want to run out of projects!) to replace the fallen down outside access stairs to the upper story.

Armed with a genuine building permit and the aforementioned ambition – as well as a notable lack of grasp of the enormity of the project- we dove headlong into the multi-month endeavor. Only when I was employed trying to establish myself in my day job was I not either directly hands on the roof project or indirectly through the contemplation of the myriad details of it.

Pencil clutched in my mouth, tape measure extended, I’m laying out rafters. Measure at least twice -these two-by-tens are precious- cut once. My mother-in-law had given me an excellent textbook on basic carpentry, and it’s dog-earred, stained, and torn. And open to the proper page in the dirt beneath the sawhorses. I get a kick out of cutting those rafter notches -bird beaks- just so.

By and by, as the story goes, the new roof structure soared skyward. The old roof was gashed significantly in several places; posts tying the new work to the old emerging through the holes. Managing an acceptable degree of watertightness throughout the duration of the project was another real challenge; our creative application of plastic sheeting sorely tested in the summer-then-fall showers. Most everything in the house -including our mattress. Yuck- got soaked at one point or another. Luckily we owned nothing we couldn’t stand to have ruined.

 I’ll never forget that stack of five-eighth inch plywood sheathing -I think there were fifty sheets- waiting to be affixed to the new rafters and ridge. Enlisting the help of a few friends who were unable to avoid it, all that plywood was positioned and nailed in place. Hammer in hand, I paused to reflect on our progress. We’re really getting somewhere now, I thought, with considerable satisfaction. The cool Autumn breeze rustled my hair -I still had plenty of it then- as I gazed out over our little valley.

The weeks went by. Marybeth and I installed the shingles by ourselves, and eventually we tore out the old roof deck from below the new work and completed installing new windows in the extended wall sections.

But well before all of that, before we could get things reasonably watertight, we had a particularly hard downpour one Sunday afternoon, and we got caught with no tarps in place. Pretty much everything in the house was soaked to dripping. The storm had just passed and we were at the height of the chaos in the aftermath of the deluge when my father-in-law just happened to drop in from out of town. He is a man of few words and much wisdom.

Retracing his steps to his car, he said politely yet resolutely, “I think I’ll come back later.”

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