Category Archives: home improvements

Happy Landings

Posted on by
10

Jack just gets under or over the wire in time this week

I finished my guest post last week about the re-roofing of our house, with a comment about the rain barrel being installed on the upstairs balcony at the back of the place. You access the balcony via a door off the landing at the top of our stairs.

This was clearly foreshadowing for Jack’s Big Adventure on Friday past… I had fitted a valve and attached a hose to eventually have the rain barrel feed our washing machine; Wendy wants to “reduce our footprint.” On Friday morning I went out in the drizzling rain to check that everything was secure and working and not sending rain straight down into the room below. As the balcony door behind me closed, I heard a click.

I had locked myself out!!

Wendy was in Knoxville, I didn’t have my phone and from this angle behind the house no neighbors would see or hear me. The rail on the balcony is fifteen feet off the ground below, which is a concrete slab. Drizzle turned to deluge as I debated what to do next.

I tried kicking the door to no avail. The nearest section of newly installed roof was wet and slippery and it felt unsafe to try again.

Then, I noticed the hose, coiled like a rope at the side of the balcony….

So I wound it around the corner post and let it dangle down, I clambered up onto the barrel and over the rail and then I grasped the hose to lower myself gently down.

A rubber hose in the rain isn’t something you can easily grasp; it’s rather like trying to hold the inside of a banana peel.

As the hose slipped through my grip I remembered my Dad stepping backwards off a painting tressle in the late 1950s and breaking both his ankles. He spent months in hospital recovering and every time it rained he had pain – – Time stretched as the hose slipped through my hands, and I wondered which bones I would break. Fate intervened. Just below was a tub full of empty cans we save for recycling. I broke the tub as the tub broke my fall, but none of my bones broke.

When I told Wendy what happened, she sent a couple of friends to check on me. We had a jolly supper together. You have to admit, it’s a funny story now that it’s safely over.

The moral of the story – always have your phone with you and friends close by!

A roofing we will go!

Posted on by
Reply

Jack just gets under the wire in time this week – –

Roofing work is both necessary and difficult to get done. Our house is old and has steep roofs at strange angles. We couldn’t find anyone locally who seemed willing to accept the challenge. These days, a roofer seems almost as rare as a good deal on beef.
But ‘word of mouth’ is a great thing and through friends of Wendy’s we were put in touch with Mikey!

Mikey had fitted a woodstove for one of Wendy’s day job board members. He lives in Norton, which is a two hour drive from here, but was willing to make the journey once he saw the property where we wanted our own wood stove fitted. It is near a well-stocked fishing stream. Mikey and his work associate James showed up with all the tools and a bunch of fishing poles.

So far so good.

They did an excellent job and we mentioned our roof, more in hopes that he knew someone than anything else, but “that’s what I do” he said. “I fit stoves as an extra job. My main trade is roofing.”

What could we say? As with so many things in life, we lucked into a wonderful moment through relationships.

So last week he and his team—consisting of James, Mikey’s sister Christie, and her son whose name we never did catch but who closely resembled Johnny Depp—camped out every night at our property (and presumably fished) and came in every morning and worked on our roofs here all day (and sometimes till the light was waning).

They all worked hard and never wasted a minute. We began to think of them as the Starship Enterprise – Mikey was Cap’n Kirk, issuing the orders; Christie was Uhuru, running from front yard to back to shout things at the roofers who couldn’t see or hear each other, and picking up tools that suddenly came flying over the guttering; and James was Scotty—when it was going wrong, he had duct tape. Or glue, or something.

There was a funny night when they thought they would finish – at least Cap’n Kirk did—and the nephew “Johnny” (who might have been a Klingon) threatened to quit if the captain issued one more frustrated order. If you’re not the person on the roof screaming at the crew to keep it together and get home tonight, it’s adorable to hear. If you are the person being screamed at, probably not so much…

Family is family. The next morning they were all still talking to each other, and right cheerful. And by that extra day’s evening, the roof was good and tight. We know because the day after they all went home, it started raining. And didn’t stop for two days.

Wendy, being Wendy, wanted a slight home improvement during the roofing: the opportunity to position a rain barrel to provide water to our washing machine. I know Mikey is a good man because, at 9 pm as dusk was not so much falling as giving way to pitch black, he fitted her rain barrel for her, and gave a courtly bow before driving off into the sunset—well, starlight—in his pick-up.

Our new roof is warm and cozy. Our new friends come highly recommended. And Wendy is already making plans for the washing machine…. Sigh…..