I would like to thank all of those who responded to my original post.

Here's what happened:

I got up on the roof and inspected it for loose shingles to no avail. I tried taking a garden hose on the roof and locating the leak that way.

I though I found it and patched accordingly. But the roof continued to leak. When I say leak I actually mean streams of water running down the wall a distance 6' feet across.

So, I decided to re-roof. During winter with absolutely no experience at all, zip. The neighbors thought us mad. As I was bring tools on the roof to get started my wife came out side to talk to me and shut the balcony door behind her and it locked. It was 20 degrees and she had PJ’s and slippers on. I had not brought the ladder around yet so we had no apparent way off the roof and our baby and toddler we locked in the house. We tried to get my daughter to open the door by she was crying and carrying on and would not come and open the door.

So, after trying many schemes to get off the roof, finely I held my wife’s hands and lowered her as much as I could so she could jump off the roof. It turned out the reason my daughter would not come when we called was because she had eaten a bar of hand soap.

I got started taking off the shingles and thought this is not going too bad. Then I took off an other and another for a total of five layers of shingles! I think you are only supposed to have three max. It took my 20 hours just to get the shingles off.

Then I found four 4x8 tempered pieces of glass framed into the roof which had been just roofed over and the roof decking was uneven because it was made of 2x6 nailed side by side. The tempered glass broke when we took them out and broke into little squares every where.

When I went to town, 1 hour each way, my truck heater core blew and leaked radiator fluid all over the cab of the truck and over heated. With the needle pegged, I pushed the truck on because I had a storm to beat.

By know I’m starting to stress because I’m two days behind schedule and the storm is two days a head. But my neighbor came to my rescue. The next day we studded in the window frames, laid the new plywood decking, laid flashing and felt.

Then I laid rolled roof, as suggested on this board because my roof has a slope of 6 degrees. The next day we were under a tornado watch and flash fooling watch. The roof held up with out leaks!

We bought our neighbor’s family dinner. We might be mad but can appreciate being pulled out of the fire!

I took the roofing material to the dump and found that that 20x30 area of roof had 4,000 lbs. of material.

With tenacity and some luck things worked out!

Thanks again and I hope you enjoyed the story.

-- StoryBook Farm (Mumaw@socket.com), March 11, 2001

Answers

Wow, what a story! I'm in awe reading it. How fortunate you are to have a good neighbor. And here I am grumbling about more snow!

-- Kate henderson (kate@sheepyvalley.com), March 11, 2001.

You poor guy! I won't complain about something for a while now.

-- Dee (gdgtur@goes.com), March 12, 2001.

Are we related ? Every project here goes wrong some how .Well be glad its done .

-- Patty {NY State} (fodfarms@slic.com), March 12, 2001.

I'm definitely going to print this out and show it to hubby next time he starts a project...sounds like a typical time here. Everything ends up being more of a project than you planned on. Glad it all worked out for you, and that your neighbors were good enough to help! Jan

-- Jan in CO (Janice12@aol.com), March 12, 2001.