Porch Roof
May. 29th, 2018 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillSo back around October or November I hired a small company to pressure wash my roof. I have a metal roof which I'm quite happy with, but it was starting to get some lichen or something on it where the maple tree drips on it regularly.
When they came we walked around the house and talked about what I wanted and I pointed out that the roof over the back porch was made of thin aluminum and wouldn't hold anybody's weight and said I didn't want them going on it, and if that meant that they couldn't pressure wash it, that was fine and to skip that part.
They got started and I went inside and about ten minutes later there was this terrible thump and I rushed outside again, to find the guy in charge lying on the patio and kind of grunting the way people do when the wind has been knocked out of them; he had overbalanced at the edge of the main roof and fallen onto the patio roof, which, as expected, had given way under him. Cue much consternation and running around and calling of 911 and then saying no ambulance when he was able to talk enough to say he didn't want one. His companion wanted to mess with my patio roof but I said just drive your boss to the emergency room; we'll sort this out later.
He came around a couple of days later and we talked about it. The patio roof is easily 30 years old or so and may be original to the house; it's made of thin aluminum panels that have a lip on each edge so they sort of snap together. He'd completely busted one panel and bent two more up to the point where there was just no way they could be straightened out to fit together. Fixing it would require replacing about a quarter of it.
Now it was, as I said, about 30 years old or maybe 50, and starting to leak a bit at the seams anyway. So I had been toying with the idea of replacing it. I proposed that I'd get the parts and he would put it together as his part of fixing the roof, because it just didn't seem right to make him pay for the whole thing.
He agreed to give me a break on the labor, and I spent several months dithering, while buckets sat on the patio trying to catch most of the rainwater before it destroyed the brickwork edge of the patio or built up in puddles that would seep down and damage the foundation. The original roof had these fiberglass panels that fit between the aluminum panels and let a little light through so the porch wasn't as dark as it otherwise would have been, and while it's still possible to get the aluminum panels or something very like them, the fiberglass ones don't seem to be made anymore.
Eventually I resigned myself to a darker porch, took all the measurements, checked around and ordered the parts. Then we had the Dance of Delivery Failure, in which the company involved tried repeatedly to get me to accept delivery from an eighteen wheeler that absolutely positively could not make it into my neighborhood. Seriously. There's a notorious corner on the way in where they've lost 3 stop signs since I moved here and the telephone pole on the other side looks like it can't take another hit. I kept warning them off; the driver kept promising that next week it would come out on the short truck and the next week I'd have another call from the driver asking how to get an eighteen wheeler into my neighborhood. I had to call the salesman. Twice. But finally I got my parts, on a short truck. It took a month, but they came.
In the meantime I have been emptying buckets and mopping the water off the back porch every time it rained. But it seems like it has rained EVERY DAY FOR A WEEK recently and I finally got so desperate (after mopping the back porch for the third time in A SINGLE DAY that I went to Walmart and bought a tarp. I drove a couple of screws into the fascia board to tie it to and got it stretched across the part where the leak is, under the roof (because of course if I put it over the roof the water would pool in the part of the tarp that wasn't supported by the hole.)
It has rained most of the day today, but gently, and so far the tarp is working, except that I can't get the water to fall quite off the edge of the porch, so it's all directed into the biggest bucket which is propped so that if it overflows it will overflow into the flowerbed.
I should have done this ages ago. Well, at least it means less mopping while I wait for the roof fixers to have an opening in their schedule.
When they came we walked around the house and talked about what I wanted and I pointed out that the roof over the back porch was made of thin aluminum and wouldn't hold anybody's weight and said I didn't want them going on it, and if that meant that they couldn't pressure wash it, that was fine and to skip that part.
They got started and I went inside and about ten minutes later there was this terrible thump and I rushed outside again, to find the guy in charge lying on the patio and kind of grunting the way people do when the wind has been knocked out of them; he had overbalanced at the edge of the main roof and fallen onto the patio roof, which, as expected, had given way under him. Cue much consternation and running around and calling of 911 and then saying no ambulance when he was able to talk enough to say he didn't want one. His companion wanted to mess with my patio roof but I said just drive your boss to the emergency room; we'll sort this out later.
He came around a couple of days later and we talked about it. The patio roof is easily 30 years old or so and may be original to the house; it's made of thin aluminum panels that have a lip on each edge so they sort of snap together. He'd completely busted one panel and bent two more up to the point where there was just no way they could be straightened out to fit together. Fixing it would require replacing about a quarter of it.
Now it was, as I said, about 30 years old or maybe 50, and starting to leak a bit at the seams anyway. So I had been toying with the idea of replacing it. I proposed that I'd get the parts and he would put it together as his part of fixing the roof, because it just didn't seem right to make him pay for the whole thing.
He agreed to give me a break on the labor, and I spent several months dithering, while buckets sat on the patio trying to catch most of the rainwater before it destroyed the brickwork edge of the patio or built up in puddles that would seep down and damage the foundation. The original roof had these fiberglass panels that fit between the aluminum panels and let a little light through so the porch wasn't as dark as it otherwise would have been, and while it's still possible to get the aluminum panels or something very like them, the fiberglass ones don't seem to be made anymore.
Eventually I resigned myself to a darker porch, took all the measurements, checked around and ordered the parts. Then we had the Dance of Delivery Failure, in which the company involved tried repeatedly to get me to accept delivery from an eighteen wheeler that absolutely positively could not make it into my neighborhood. Seriously. There's a notorious corner on the way in where they've lost 3 stop signs since I moved here and the telephone pole on the other side looks like it can't take another hit. I kept warning them off; the driver kept promising that next week it would come out on the short truck and the next week I'd have another call from the driver asking how to get an eighteen wheeler into my neighborhood. I had to call the salesman. Twice. But finally I got my parts, on a short truck. It took a month, but they came.
In the meantime I have been emptying buckets and mopping the water off the back porch every time it rained. But it seems like it has rained EVERY DAY FOR A WEEK recently and I finally got so desperate (after mopping the back porch for the third time in A SINGLE DAY that I went to Walmart and bought a tarp. I drove a couple of screws into the fascia board to tie it to and got it stretched across the part where the leak is, under the roof (because of course if I put it over the roof the water would pool in the part of the tarp that wasn't supported by the hole.)
It has rained most of the day today, but gently, and so far the tarp is working, except that I can't get the water to fall quite off the edge of the porch, so it's all directed into the biggest bucket which is propped so that if it overflows it will overflow into the flowerbed.
I should have done this ages ago. Well, at least it means less mopping while I wait for the roof fixers to have an opening in their schedule.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-29 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-31 06:41 pm (UTC)