My Wife Got Shingles

My god it’s been a while since my last entry. Sorry. Still plowing through leftovers from the Thanksgiving feast THAT NO ONE ATTENDED NOT EVEN YOU. That’s keeping me very, very busy, and too full to reach my keyboard.

NewWifey(tm)’s been busy too. On top of her normal wifely duties (watching Oprah, eating bon-bons, pressing my shirts…into the ground, head, car repairs) she now had to go and get shingles.

You may recall that problems with a leaking roof have been looming large over Dangerhouse recently. And with the advent of winter, “problems” could soon escalate to “hell on earth”. It’s bad enough when summer rains start pooling in the attic, seeping through the ceiling, and ruining my fat guy mumus. But once those pools start turning to ice, expanding as they do, we’re now talking damage potentially in the “pack up honey, we’re moving to Guam” range.

Calling a roofer to address the issue ASAP would seem to be in order then, no? I thought so too. So we did our due diligence, typing “What Roofer Will Not Rip Us Off?” into Google and calling the first name that popped up.

“Nope. Can’t do it” said the first roofer.

“Why not?” I said. “You’re a roofing company. It says so right in your name. I’m asking you to roof. What’s the problem?”

“The problem” said the roofer, “is roof glue. It won’t stick below 45 degrees. Your roof will blow off if you sneeze, if we replace your roof now. Try calling again in May.”

May? As in, May 2018? As in….from Guam?

Better try another roofer. One with better glue.

No luck. They all apparently use the same brand of adhesive. None would agree to work on our roof unless we signed a waiver releasing them from all responsibility upon our inevitable death two week after they finish work.

Nuts. Time to look up Pacific island real estate agents and learn to make poi. I told NewWifey(tm) the plan.

“Are you crazy?” she said. “I can’t stand poi. I’ll fix it myself.”

“You’re going to replace our roof? YOU? No offense, but…I mean, how are you gonna get around this whole ‘roof glue doesn’t work in cold weather‘ thing? That seems important.”

“I’m not gonna replace it” she said. “I’ll just patch it up enough so it lasts the winter. Then we can call a real roofer again in the spring to do a proper job.”

So this past weekend she got up on the roof with her dowsing rod or whatever the hell she used to divine where the water was coming through, and got to work. She already had a general idea of the ingress points after scouring around the attic previously, so that helped. But she also found while on the roof itself that there was a problem with the soffits.

I have no idea what soffits are. But ours apparently have a problem. A problem that my saintly NewWifey(tm) patiently explained to me thusly: “WHAT THE HELL KIND OF MAN ARE YOU? HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW WHAT A ROOF SOFFIT IS?”

That helped immensely by getting me to Google it. I now know what a roof soffit is. Thanks, NewWifey(tm)!

(If you’re not a man either, and you don’t feel like Googling it, a soffit is this thing that kinda has something to do with the edge of the roof and, like, connects the overhanging edge to the vertical wall of your house. Now go back inside and knit a doily or something.)

So our soffit, according to NewWifey(tm), is angled wrong and filling with water, allowing water to pool against the house instead of down the drain pipes. If it snows, that’s going to form an ice dam, and that will be dam bad. There was something in there about rotting roof sheathing being a big part of it too, but by that time my brain had left for Florida and I retained nothing.

Problems identified, she got to work. Or rather, WE got to work. Despite marriage vows which specifically state that I am under no circumstances to be allowed near power tools or construction materials, NewWifey(tm) pressed me into service. I was required to hold the ladder while she ascended and descended, and hand up beers while she worked. I’ll file a formal protest later.

In between those arduous duties I managed to snap a few pics:

This, apparently, was the necessary first step. That strip is going down under the roof shingles so that…I have no idea. I’m Beer Boy, remember?

Note the house shingles directly underneath NewWifey(tm). We’ll get back to them in a moment. Also note the spiffy leather tool belt she’s sporting, along with the contractor grade Bosch cordless drill hanging from it. Both were Christmas presents from an attentive hubby.

Once that strip was laid down, the soffits had to be taken care of. Again, I have no idea how. But she did it. It involved the extensive use of that Bosch drill, a big-ass strip of some angled fiberglass thing, and a lot of cursing.

Including at me:

Yup. Til death do us part.

This portion of the work spanned the entire weekend and most of Monday afternoon. Personally I thought she was slacking off, but I decided to keep that opinion to myself. She’s pretty quick with that drill.

Tuesday, having finished soffiting and cursing, she commenced patching and cursing. Lying flat on her stomach she stapled several large squares of blue plastic tarp over the holes she had found during her previous inspection. This didn’t take nearly as long. We were done before nightfall. I only had to pass up 3 beers.

So, back to those black, ragged, and sometimes missing, shingles. I kinda like how they look, in the way that I like the way bottle blonds look when their roots start showing. Two-tone is very chic if you ask me. And I started to say so to NewWifey(tm).

She stopped me before I even got to the Peroxide Girl analogy. “Idiot, that’s MOLD. Mold and water damage. Like inside your closet. Remember how that smelled? If those shingles continue soaking through and falling off, that’s what we’ll have all through the house. Sorry, but you’re not getting a two-tone house. We’re going to re-shingle.”

“When?”

“I’ll be right back.”

She unhooked her belt, set down her beer, and climbed into the Nissan. A minute later she’d disappeared over our hill.

An hour later she pulled back in the driveway and beeped for me to come help her. I opened the back of the Rogue. It was loaded all the way up, and onto, the passenger seat with boxes and boxes of cedar shingles.

“I wiped out Wadeson’s” NewWifey(tm) said. “They’ll have more in next week, but this should be enough to replace the worst of them.”

“When do you want to do this?”

She looked at me. “When? What do you mean, ‘when’? It’s still light out, isn’t it?”

Fortunately it was only light for another hour or so. She managed to replace maybe an even 20 shingles, methodically hammering the mouthful of nails she’d loaded up, but finally had to concede it was too dark to go on. Plus, we were out of beer. If you’ve ever had shingles, you know beer is one of the only things that help. We had to knock off for the night.

As it turns out, we both have appointments the rest of this week (me: dentist, parole check-in…her: weightlifting class or something) so the remaining shingle-dingle will have to wait until the weekend. The house looks a bit of a cubist nightmare, with the blue squares of tarp on the roof and the patchwork of black, brown, missing, and cedar shingles on the front. But at least we’re not eating poi in Guam. I hate poi too.

Well, I guess that’s it. There’s really only one cheeky thing left to say:

The end.