Testing

Monday, March 5, 2012

When it rains, it pours...

And now I know why.

Today I decided to finish working on the eaves of the house. I started on them last year. I know, I know.... it should have been done already. But I went to sleep and when I woke up a year had gone by and the eaves still weren't finished being repaired. (To be fair, the wife is very efficient when it comes to planning things for us to do on my day off.) Anyway, today was the day to finish.

I pulled out the scaffold, ladder and tools. I ripped out the bad soffit and I was greeted with this:



If you aren't sure what you're looking at, it's the underside of the roof sheathing. And it shouldn't be wet and rotted like this. So instead of just working on the soffit I decided to replace the sheathing. This involves removing shingles, tar paper, etc, then cutting out the bad sheathing and replacing it. Then you have to replace the drip edge, tar paper, flashing, and finally the shingles. I've not replaced shingles before. I know how to install them initially, but I haven't had the opportunity to replace damaged ones on an existing roof. This was going to be fun.

Here's another shot of the damaged area (from below):




First step: remove the shingles from the affected area-



Next step: Remove the felt/tar paper to expose the wood- and guess what I find!


The idiots that put the roof on put the flashing ON TOP of the upper layer of tar paper instead of under it. You can clearly see the bump in the flashing that was allowing water to run straight down onto the wood. Like making a funnel for the rain to run into the walls. Freakin' idiots! Once I removed that flashing, the wood underneath it just fell apart.



And the view from the bottom:



Moving forward: Remove the bad sheathing-



After removing the bad wood, I "sistered" some 2x4's to the existing so that I would have a place to nail the new wood down on the left and to level the board on the right that was water damaged on the top. You can see the added boards in the photo above.

Next I put the new plywood in place:



Next: Tar paper, starter course of shingle, and flashing. I also put in a new drip edge before adding the preceding items. The drip edge has to go on first :)



It's not perfect, but it's not bad either. And it shouldn't leak. Now for the fun part.... tying in the new shingles to the old. This is the part I was unsure of but it turned out fairly well.



You can see a slight "hill" on the left where I tied into the existing shingles. I think I should have taken out a bit more, but wasn't sure. Apparently I should have :) All in all it's not bad for a first time with no guidance. The new shingles are some that came with the house so I'm assuming that's what the old ones looked like when they were first installed. It's about time for a new roof- there are issues in other places as well. I'm thinking about taking a week or so off and replacing the roof myself. I'm confident that I can do it, but I hate to try to tackle that by myself. I hate paying someone to do it even more :)