Friday, May 30, 2008

Roofing is Hard

Roofing is hard. Its fun though. This week weve been roofing. We roofed the president of KHO's house, Todd. Convenient huh? He had a pretty big roof, it was a tough job to do in 3 days. we split the roof up into three sections, the back we did the first two days, one half each day, and then the front all in one day. The front didnt have any valleys or anything too difficult, and the front had two sections coming out from it, leaving us with four valleys and two extra ridges.
The first thing we had to do once we got up on the roof was take the old shingles and tar paper off. we tood roofing shovels and scraped all the shingles, tar paper, and old nails out of the roof. Once everything is off the roof, we laid tar paper down over the sections where we had pulled shingles from, laid chalk lines to serve as a guide when we laid shingles. the next step is laying shingles, we put a starter strip down first, and then laid 3D or architectural shingles. The valleys require a little attention, but nothing too bad when you have someone showing you what to do. Roofs dont seem too terribly complicated when youre working with someone who knows what their doing, when its just me, well see how that goes. the only bad thing about roofing is the temperature. its freaking hot! when the sun comes out and theres black tar paper and black shingles on the roof, the temperature rises very quickly. in the afternoon, you can barely sit on the roof while working. i was working with whitney yesterday putting ridge caps on (the pieces that cover the peaks of the roof) and we couldnt sit down for more than a few minutes without having to get up. shingles are also very heavy, and well generally have to take them up the ladders to the roofs manually which gets old with an 80 lb bag of shingles.

This week has been pretty hectic with these roofs. weve still been getting up at 515ish, and getting to the site and starting to work at 6, and most days we work until atleast 6. 12 hr work days in the hot sun are long and hard, but im loving every minute of it. i feel fairly confident i can teach a group of campers how to put a roof on and it look halfway decent. im a little shaky on the ramps, but im guessing i wont be doing too many ramps this summer, and even if i am weve got 5 decks next week and thats the exact same minus adding an angle for the slant. Im guessing im going to be doing roofs for most of the summer since ive done KHO before and and have done construction projects before, and have more construction experience than most of the new people. im really looking forward to it.

only 9 more days till campers come

2 comments:

momofthreegirls said...

Sounds like you are working very hard, but loving it. It is a good feeling. Be careful

Barb said...

todd is so smart- chuck and i need to start making the youth come to our house and do some work on it to get them ready for kho each summer!! =)