Hoists

We're really into the outdoor projects, Justin and I. The inside is by no means finished but we're running low on summer evenings and autumn is nipping at our heels. So before the rain becomes a daily annoyance, we're getting our house prepped for new gutters. Mostly this means painting the rafter tails to seal up the wood but in the back of the house, it means a small structural repair. You see, when we pulled off the old gutter back there, there was a 4 inch sag in the center of our eve. We should have noticed it because our gutter had a way of collecting all of the rain water in the middle of the gutter and then spilling it over the side. But, we have had a long, dry summer and I suppose we put it out of our minds, until it became inconvenient. Our gutter removal crew (Justin) made the discovery of the sag last weekend when he pulled off all of the silt-filled gutters and our gutter contractor didn't have a plan to address the problem, except running the downspouts to the low spot which seemed pretty half-assed. So we decided to undertake a little structural repair ourselves and Justin dreamed up a pretty clever solution. The short version is that we levered up the low spot in the roof and attached a structural fascia board to the rafter tails to hold everything in place. The pictures fill in some of the detail.

Another day in demolition

The snow has melted enough now that we were able get up on the roof today. Today's project was tearing down the chimney below the roofline and patching the roof. This is our last big demo project to complete before we can start construction. Justin scrambled up there and had the chimney knocked down below the roofline in about 15 minutes. That was the easy part because the mortar was so loose that it really wasn't doing anything. Too bad though because earlier we had stopped by the Home Depot for a fancy new tool, a roto-hammer, for busting up the mortar. After we had the big hole in our roof, we went back to the Depot for roof patching materials. Of course, they didn't have the shingles we needed and couldn't get them anytime soon.

Here's Justin up on the roof with the chimney liner pulled out.

Yeah! Waste Management finally came to pick up our dumpster. We got to meet our neighbor Brett who lives in the house just behind this truck. He helped up shovel the alley a little to get the WM truck into our driveway.

A shot of our hole before the patch.

Here's Justin cutting up some new framing for the rafters to fill in our hole in the roof.