roofs and hammers
The other Jerry writes about his roofing woes and the cost to have his buildings repaired.
This got me to thinking about my one and only roofing job, that I undertook as a do it myself project.
We had just moved into our 1st house circa 1962, which was a small 2 br, 1 b 1 car wood box built in around 1950. We got it from friends of my wifes family who had been renting it out , but as they lived of of town and found it hard to take care of their property they decided to turn the mortgage over to us.
After we had moved in and done some painting inside and out we we quite content in our little abode. My mother in law was in the insurance business and we had our house insured thru her.
The one thing we had not done anything with was the roof, the shingles were original and were in bad shape but money was a problem so doing the roof was not a priority. One weekend her mother was visiting and after we had talked about the storm that had passed thru a few days before, she looked up at the roof and said she could see some place where the strong winds had blown off a few shingles. She said she would have an appraiser come out and do his thing. Well to make a long story short we were given a check for a few hundred dollars to to repair the roof.
I was working at Sears at that time so I went and bought all the materials , a got my employee discount applied so there was a few bucks left over. After all was delivered I waited for a weekend to start pounding nails. My tools consisted of a 6ft step ladder , 16 oz hammer and a nail apron. Now never having shingled a roof, I was happy to see there were some basic instructions on how to layout them so every thing would be aligned. I decided to start on the back side so I could get the hang of it.
Now it’s July in Houston where it feels like being in a sauna, so you know it’s gonna be hot on the roof. I set up the ladder and grabbed a bundle of shingles, which felt like they weighed around 100 #’s, and started moving them from the ground to the roof. I am not a big person and I weighed in at about 150# tops, after getting 3 bundles I was exhausted and decided I needed to take a break to get my wind back so after loading around 10 bundles on the roof I begin laying and hammering them in place.
I finally got a little faster on driving nails and started to think my name was Jose, all the mexicans did roofing in Houston at that time. Late in the after noon I was getting tired and careless and I flattened my left thumb with that 16 oz hammer as good as if I had tried to hit it on purpose. Needless to say it hurt like hell and after screaming and hopping around on the sloping roof, I decided I had earned the right to drink a beer.
I worked until almost dark to finish the back side of the house, which didn’t look to bad as most of the shingles weren’t that wavy.
So early on Sunday off I want to do the street side of the roof feeling full of confidence that I bordered on being a good roofer. I of course had the bad left thumb which still throbbed some from the beating it took on Saturday, so my speed was not the same as the day before.
After taking a short break for some snacks and intake of water off I went to get it done before sundown, of course I started to try and speed things up and got careless and knocked the “sh*t” out of my already smashed thumb. When this happened I screamed like a sissy boy and then threw the hammer out into the street, then my wife came out and asked what was wrong an
d not wanting to have her believe I was a whimp I said, the hammer slipped out of my hand and rolled down to the street and would she please get it and chunk it back on the roof. I didn’t want to go get it my self as she may have seen the tears of pain running down my cheeks.
I did finish around dark with no further catastrophes and was pleased with the results…
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