Offcuts: New Shingles By: Don Heisz

Spring has suddenly appeared and I should start thinking about cleaning up the yard and maybe doing something more with the outside of my house. A few things have to happen here, sometime soon. Probably the main thing that needs to happen is the roof needs new shingles. It not only needs new shingles, it needs the old shingles removed and possibly some repairs to the sheathing and eaves. Such is the life of a house.

Ah, but I’ll likely shelve that project for another year. The roof isn’t leaking, yet.

Many projects line the shelves. I think I need new shelves.

Thinking of this reminds me of one of the first jobs I ever had. I worked for this fellow named Roy on his house. He had lots of shelved projects and decided he needed a helper, so I was his helper of choice for a while. I was quite young, though, so I couldn’t be expected to be of much value but I think he may have hired me to force himself to start getting things done. One of the first things he got me to do was help reshingle his garage roof.

Hindsight is a strange thing. I’m sure that, at the time, I thought Roy was quite good at what he was doing. But I currently imagine he was not very good at all. That may have to do with the fact that it took us over a week to reshingle his single-car garage. It was little more than a shed, actually, with a flip-up sheet metal door that really no longer closed. A better plan would have been to tear it down and build something better.

But that’s my normal choice for the better plan. And I find it allows me to not do anything at all.

Anyway, my task was to clean the garbage and haul shingles up the ladder. A full bundle was a bit heavy, so I normally brought up about five at a time. I think my leg strength increased drastically from all the ladder climbing even if I wasn’t exerting myself carrying shingles.

Roy worked more or less on his belly. And he was not exactly a thin fellow. He had a paper bag with roofing nails and a ten-dollar hammer and would line up the shingles using the little cuts in the end and then drive between two and eight nails in each shingle, depending how rotten the boards of the roof were.

That’s another detail that just returned to me. The roof of the garage was tongue and groove boards. They were not in great shape, either. So, another better plan would have been to add a layer of plywood or OSB over it before shingling.

After ten or so shingles, Roy liked to get off the roof and walk around a bit. Getting back onto the ladder from his downward-facing belly-flopped position was a challenge and I recall it looking a bit like a porpoise trying to walk down stairs. The operation would take a few minutes, then ten minutes or so on the ground, then back up the ladder where he would always smoke a cigarette and admire the view, then back on his belly to drive some more nails.

I can imagine how uncomfortable that would be.

Work tended to only last the few hours from when he got home from his real job until the sun went down. So, maybe over a week of such days was a fair amount of time to spend on a small roof.

After that project ended, there were a few more things that he had me help him with. But they didn’t offer me the entertainment value of watching him on the roof.

And thinking about it all makes me want to go up on my own roof even less.