Hows my little roof?

Ever since we moved into our little home in Oakwood, Laura and I have said, we need to get a new roof on our garage. This weekend we made it happen. Holy Shit. It is expensive and ridiculously hard work. I now understand why people pay to have this done to their homes...and we just did our small garage!

Here it is in pictures:

This is why we reshingled. They were plainly in very poor shape. And a large patch was installed incorrectly as shown)

My Dad the hero with his roofing shovel/rake.

The roof shovel/rake thing was amazing, If you're ever going to peel off shingles from a house using anything that isn't this or hired work you're wasting energy and time. It has claws and a lever so it pulls up nails while tearing the shingle off the roof. We saw a couple of brands at the store and I recommend using the one that has the best leverage underneath.

Laura was the shingle redistributer/shingle maid

My Dad and I had clashing ideas on how to peel off both the top layer and the unexpected  second layer. He and Laura liked peeling them off one big chunk and layer at a time. I didn't mess around, if I had to bend over for this shit I decided it was all coming at once. The negative to my speed was I made a bigger mess.

Here is Laura fishing shingles out of our Dogwood bush.

"Laura, look like a badass with your hammer."

One fun thing when re-roofing is finding out what lies beneath. Turns out the gutter I hung a couple of years ago pulled the facia off the house a bit and a couple of main boards started to rot. Good thing I bought some extra boards just in case. This repair work slowed us down quite a bit on Saturday.

The hardest part is over! Getting 20 packs of shingles on the roof, via ladder.

I just posed for this picture, Laura and Dad did everything.

Day two Laura and I both woke up tired and sore. My Dad said his back hurt, and I was actually surprised that he showed up for a second day, he left us after day one looking just shy  of a zombie. We worked for 11 hours on Saturday and another 8 on Sunday. Laura's legs were throbbing from squatting to pick up all of the old and new shingles, and my shoulders hurt from taking so many pictures, and lifting my lemonade to my own mouth so often.

Progress! Cutting shingles around vents blows.

Before

After

So, if you need someone to help you re-shingle your house, call someone else. But! I will help you rip off old ones because that was actually kind of fun. As many of you know, I hate bending over. Squatting, crawling around on my hands and knees (unless its an obstacle course of some kind), and bending ranks right up there with listening to country music for more than 45 continuous seconds. On the bright side, the weather was great, it was sunny with temperatures in the high 50's and we actually wore sweatshirts for awhile each day.

We are both thrilled this job is behind us. Now it's time for bed. I'm exhausted.