New Roof Accomplit!

Tuesday dawned happy and warm. 
Roofing materials had been delivered on Monday afternoon, as had a dumpster of sorts.
I woke up for the second time at 7:00 AM.  It wasn't even really light out yet when the truck arrived with five workers in it...and only one of them spoke a lick of English!

They soon got to work, and what a noisy job roof removal is!  The guys had to strip two layers of roofing.  Shortly before noon, I was informed that five sheets of plywood decking would need to be replaced due to rot.  I was shown pictures which I never doubted.  It added to the estimate by a bit, but I was happy to do what needed to be done to have a great roof. 

The crew didn't take a single break until almost 1:00.  (How do they do that?)   They sat on the ground in front of my split rail fence and asked nothing of no one.  There was a plate of beans and  pork that I saw...who knows what else?  I scraped up five bags of 100-calorie chocolate crisps from Aldi to give them, just because it was all I had!  No one asked for a thing. 

The dirty work--stripping--happened in the morning.  The afternoon was dedicated to shingle installation and cleanup.  I was mostly trapped in the house due to falling shingles, so I can only speculate.  At one point, I went out front and handed my phone to a worker and gestured to have some pictures of the process.  He handed it up to the roof, then it came back to me.  Yeah!

When the shingles were being installed with nail guns, I was hearing their pattern.  Over and over and over again, the pattern was "shave and a haircut"...but nothing after that!  My poor compulsive brain was supplying "two bits".  Ack!  It went on for hours!

At one point, the one woman in the crew knocked on my door to report, in broken English, "No power."  The nail guns had tripped a breaker, so I found it and reset it...then shut off everything in the house except the TV and the computer.  The rest of the day went smoothly.

By 2:30 in the afternoon, the roof was finished.  The crew was mopping up.  When they finally departed, there was no evidence that a roof replacement had ever happened unless you were looking for it.  Hallelujah!

The relief, the pride, the confidence of having done what needed to be done waved over me.  I will have a small loan payment for the next three years, but my little house-on-a-slab is so much better because of it.  And I suddenly realized that these roots have been, aside from my daughter and grandchildren, a reason to stay alive. 

Happy to finally say that the roof over my head is solid.  God's in His Heaven.  All's right with the world!