Up On The Roof

When my kids were small I used to put Christmas lights up along the edge of the roof along the front of the house. It was always a slightly exhilarating / terrifying experience. The roof has a kind of a steep pitch, about 9/12 I think, which means it goes up nine feet for every 12 feet it goes across. If the surface isn't slippery you can stand on it, but of course it is always a little slippery, which makes it treacherous.

There are some places along the front of the house where if you slid off the roof you would land in a flower bed. There are others where you would land on sidewalk. Likewise if you lost your balance along a gable. I don't know if it would make a difference where you landed. The concrete was definitely scarier.

A few years ago I decided I had had enough of that and stopped putting up the lights. There were some minor protests, but nobody else was willing to do it, so it didn't get done, and I thought I was done with going up on the roof. Then I got laid off.

Last year my wife was making a fuss about some shingles that had come off the roof, so I called a couple of roofing guys to come out and take a look. They were looking for a big job: replace the entire roof. One guy said the roof was fine but he could send a guy out to take care of the damage for a couple hundred bucks. I thought that would be fine but I never heard anymore from him.

A couple of weeks ago my neighbor points out that I am missing some shingles and when I look I notice he is correct. There are probably a dozen cap shingles missing from the ridges near the top. Dash and bother. Looks like I am actually going to have to do something about it this time.

I look on Craigslist but I don't find anybody in Hillsboro. There are plenty of guys all over the metro area, but I don't want to hire somebody from the East side, it will cost a hundred dollars just to have him drive clear out here. That doesn't make much sense for a $200 repair job. So I call one guy I know in the area. He has one contact who does roofs, so I call him, he comes out and gives me a bid for a thousand dollars. The repairs are indeed only $200, but he is from Tualatin, which is not the East side, but it may as well be, and he wants another $800 to clean the roof and apply moss killer.

I'm looking at this roof and I'm thinking it's not going to last another five years. I don't want to be spending a thousand dollars now when it may only take five thousand to replace it. I had the moss removed a couple of years ago, so it's not like it's that bad. You can see little bits of it growing along the edges of the shingles on the North side. Besides, with the state the roof is in, cleaning it may do as much damage as leaving it alone.

I talk to my lawn man. He and his helper cleaned the roof the last time, maybe they would be willing to do the repairs and clean the gutters. Well, he's willing, but his right hand man has gone back to Mexico to deal with some family matters. So if I'm willing, he's willing to help me. Dash and bother.

So here I am up on the roof again. This time at least I have a decent ladder. I bought it a couple of years ago. It's a fiberglass extension ladder between 15 and 20 long. Cost like $200. That was painful. The roof is slippery: it's covered with loose granules from the asphalt shingles. I try hosing them off and brushing them off, but they are surprisingly resistant to such mild attempts to get them tumbling. If I am going to get them off I will have to be more aggressive. I wonder if it will help, or will the still attached granules simply come loose when I step on them?

Roofs are stupid. More people are killed falling off roofs than are killed by meteorites. There really is no safe way to work on a roof unless you have a rope and a harness, and then the rope dragging on the roof is likely to cause as much damage as you repair. You should probably just burn the house down.

I climbed up there anyway and managed to replace all the broken/missing shingles. I only spend an hour or two at it every day. By the time I have gotten the ladder out, climbed onto the roof and spent fifteen minutes working I am sweating like a pig. I suspect it is because I am using muscles I don't usually use, but it could be nerves.

Rob, the lawn man, came by earlier this week and we tried cleaning the gutters along the back edge of the house. The back edge of the house is a different story than the front. Along most of the back edge there is a narrow bit of roof over the main floor. If you fall off the main roof there you will bounce off this narrow bit and then fall two stories into a flower bed where you will probably die. Along the rest of the back edge it's three stories straight down onto a brick like patio. If you fall off the roof there you will probably break your neck and be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of your miserable life.

Rob wants to walk along the edge of the roof with his leaf blower and blow the debris out of the gutters. He wants me to sit on the roof on the other side of the ridge from him and hold onto a rope that he has tied around his waist. I'm not too sure about this, but he's been up here before, and he is going to be in the dangerous position, so I go along with his scheme. He tries it and but quickly gives it up as a bad job: the roof is too slippery to allow him to stand.

His idea was that if he fell, he would fall onto the roof and my job was just to keep him from sliding off. I am not going to try this again. Even if things had worked well and he hadn't fallen, or if he had slipped and fallen onto the roof we could have still gotten into a world of hurt. With him moving around I was hard pressed to keep the slack out of the line. I was not putting any tension on it, just trying to keep it from developing any slack that would allow him to slide any distance. I had the rope around my waist and was trying to grip the two ends of the rope together, which is sort of how I think belaying is done. But with him moving I was having to constantly adjust the position of the rope, which meant that most of the time I did not have a firm grip on it.

And that was just if everything went well. If something bad happened, like he tripped and fell over the edge, and I did have a firm grip on the rope like I was supposed to, we could have both ended up going over the edge.

I am thinking about installing a permanent anchor point on the top of the roof so I would have somewhere to attach a safety line. Of course, that would mean I would have to climb to the top in order to hook on.

Rob is coming back next week with a 40 foot ladder. It will take that big a ladder to reach the gutters above the patio, and it will take both of us to put it up. I guess it's safer than using a rope and harness, but in either case it's a long way up.