Roof complete

As promised, the roof pictures. From the south, compare with the earlier pictures with the lower box gutter falling off the house. We had originally intended simply to remove that eyebrow, but it turned out that its joists are the ceiling joists of the brick section. When we took it off, we could see the stairs.

So we put it back.

The north side of the house looks even cooler, I think. These eaves hang pretty far out, and the contractor was pretty frustrated that I wanted them wrapped in metal instead of vinyl. (The width made the metal hard to handle without it buckling.) But there's no other plastic in this house, and I don't intend to be the one to start.

I'm thinking some horizontal boards similar to the ones on the eaves on the sunroom (the very top right of the first picture up there) might look nice, and tie the whole thing together visually. Opinions?

So given my recent strides in electrical work in the carriage house, here's my rough to-do list:

1. Carriage house livability


• Garage area livability
• Remove superfluous fiberglass insulation from the ceiling and around heating ducts (we're going to heat the garage area, after all; we're living in it)
• Drywall the south wall where the garage door used to be
• Caulk everywhere (a lot is done; more to be done)
• Some plaster patching
• More paint, aye


• Windows
• Finish bathroom window
• Kitchen window


• Bathroom
• Attach and plumb vanity


2. Carriage house electrical work
• Replace stolen ground wire outside
• Entryway lighting
• Overhead light for washer/dryer area
• Separate circuit for bedroom to permit use of air conditioner


3. Carriage house paint and trim
• Paint walls and trim in bathroom
• All window trim


4. Big house


• Upstairs bathroom plumbing
• Cleaning
• Winterization, a lengthy process
• Heat
• Electrical systems: oh the humanity!

The old box gutters on the back section

Here's one of the pictures I took while destroying the box gutters, about three weeks ago. I just really like the way it turned out.

It kills me that I don't have the resources to restore the box gutters. I really like the roof we put on, don't get me wrong - and it does have the advantage that rain doesn't come through it - but it's bland. I'm thinking of ways to de-bland it, and maybe next year we'll talk about that in more detail. The proximate goal was a dry house.

I keep forgetting to take a picture of the new roof(s) from the south side. Once I do that, I can officially cross the roof work off the list here on the blog; the actual job was finished on Saturday.

New dining room roof

The new dining room roof has actually been done for a while now (about three weeks), but since work is still underway on the blue room roof and the outer edge and eaves of the roof on the back rooms, I haven't thought to blog this part. Looks better, doesn't it? But much, much more saliently, it also keeps water out of the dining room.

Second-story frame roof

The roof of the blue room and the back stairs is the roof we're working on this week. Here is the original picture from May. The brick there is the upstairs sunroom; the window in the frame part is a small hallway window at the top of the stairs, currently half-hidden behind a door which is nailed open. (This is because the upstairs was heated with wood using a stove in the downstairs back room. The heat went up the back stairs, then the return air came down the front stairs. I'm told it worked pretty darned well. Looking at the layout, I can only shudder and think "Fire hazard," but that's just me.)

Here's the same roof yesterday. We've basically taken off the box gutters. You can't see it in either of these pictures, but there was a brick chimney at the back of the blue room, blocked off at the first-floor ceiling. We removed it - it was essentially a stack of bricks with some sand between them. It caused me some significant fear thinking that the rest of the house is also basically a stack of bricks with sand between them, but mostly the mortar in the house proper is in kinda-sorta good shape. Still needs lots of tuck pointing, though.

Like the dining room roof, this roof was structurally pretty sound, with basically mulch where its box gutters used to be. We put another layer of plywood on top, but the rafters and planking were in fine condition. As you can see, this bit of roof really doesn't have much of a pitch. Ah well. It keeps the rain off - or rather, it didn't, until today.

As of today, by the way, my house has a fully non-leaking roof.

See that hole in the roof? There was a flue there.

It was long since blocked off, of course, but it had softened the planks around it to the point where we had to take them off. And I realized - now is the perfect time to insulate! See the ceiling plaster from the top? Actually, that ceiling is concealed now; it was in bad enough shape that they just framed in four inches below it and insulated below it, but more insulation never hurts!

So, $90 and two hours with a rented blower later, we got one warm room in the big house.

So that was today's progress. The roof is closed up now, with tar paper on it. Shingles go on Monday. Over the weekend, I'll continue work on the baseboard heat. There are four more heaters to install, and three wall thermostats. Textbook electrical work.

Dining room roof Before

Boy, posting has gotten sparse, hasn't it? Sorry about that (especially to you, Mystery Seventh Follower). But it was all up to technical problems - specifically, I'd taken the Before pictures of the dining room roof with my daughter's camera, and we couldn't find the cable. Today, I found the cable! So here's the before on the dining room roof.

I've uploaded this at 1MB, twice the resolution I've been stingily using here on The House, because there's a lot of information in this picture. (Click it for the big version.) But the upshot is: this roof on the embayment on the north side was raining through the ceiling to a serious extent, and it's the first work I've paid to have done on The House. So it's a landmark decision.

The roof was covered in tar, over shingles, over tin (sigh), and the box gutters were rotted, as is the general case throughout the building. On the left point where the box gutter is flush to the brick, you can see a gray line running upwards, then to the right. That, my friends, is a live power wire, which leads out the basement window, over the dining room, and through the brick wall into the bathroom of the blue room. !! No, this is not compliant with code anywhere except possibly in Nigeria. It is dangerous. I'm pretty sure that's the power to the Blue Room, though. I don't know yet. Wiring will therefore be figuring in my life in the upcoming months.

This picture also shows the interesting vertical crack down from the second-story bathroom window (the leaded window in the upper left). That was obviously another full-sized window, probably another bedroom, that was bricked in with a smaller window when the bathtub was put in. It - like the rest of the house - is crying out for tuck pointing.

I have bought a grout bag (a $5.26 investment at Lowe's) for said tuck pointing. Way easier, I'm told, than troweling it all in. I'll update you on that when I get started.

Here's a view from the top of the left-hand end of the box gutter. Sigh. I can only feel good about the fact that all this is historical now; it's already history. But this nice little hole is responsible for a three-foot-wide strip of moldering plaster and sagging wallpaper in the dining room below it. Also, if you're into flashing, you can cringe with me looking at the upper right of this photo. If you've never considered how roofs are supposed to interface with brick, please have my assurances that this is not it.

Flabbergastingly, the underlying structure of this roof was sound. It was all original timber, dating to about 1910 when they built the embayment and presumably put in the buffet and the woodwork. We had to replace some of the 1x planks in the roof and shore up two rafters that had suffered water damage, but otherwise, this roof just got a new surface. At the edge, we replaced the old box gutter with an angled affair which I'll show you later (that camera is in the car, and not here right now). Turns out that the brick goes right up to the top corner on the roof, so we couldn't substantially change its shape.

Anyway, more later. I've nearly finished the bathroom window, and the current top item is baseboard heating (I've bought the heaters and gotten the permit - halfway done! Ha!) But as it is Labor Day, work is calling.

It's raining

But the dining room is still dry. I have pictures of the original dining room roof on my daughter's camera, so until I find that cable, I won't post on the roof project, but I will say this: sometimes it's a hell of a lot faster to hire some guys. It cost me $1000 in labor and a few hundred in materials, but one of the two leaky sections of roof is no longer leaky. One more (to be done after Labor Day) and the roof is done, baby, done. That, and gutters, and we'll have a dry basement.

More this weekend; the paying work's been frantic this week.

Roofs

There's one thing I'm going to pay people to do - or two, really. That's roofs, and gutters. I have decided I'm just not cut out for getting on ladders, and until I build an access stairway to the roof, that means hiring help. Ha!

Anyway, so we brought in a contractor to quote us two sections of roof (I'll document them later; I'm running kind of late with the blogging lately). Then after we got that priced out, at a reasonable $3400 for the two parts needed on the big house, it rained a bunch.

Turns out the carriage house needs some work. Well, I thought I'd have another year or two on it, but uh-uh. It's at least twenty years old, if not older, and the shingles are basically gone.

But there's no money right now for that. So we're slapping a tarp on it, and maybe next year the money will be there. We shall see. In the meantime, I kind of like the blue look. What do you think? It's way better than waiting for the ceiling plaster to erode and fall on our heads, anyway.