It has been a good week, although it has had more stress than usual: not the stress you might have been expecting me to mention, the stress of having a lot going on and needing to juggle it all. No, it's been the stress of having a roof installed. I'll spoil the suspense. This story ends well, with a roof installed as it was promised to us:
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| New Roof at Dusk |
Of course, we were told the roof would be installed on Tuesday, August 20. August 20 came and went with no sign of the roofing crew. We also were missing the signed contract, which we signed digitally on the devices of the sales team, which never showed up in our e-mail inboxes.
By Wednesday morning, my spouse and I were both incredibly anxious. I had this vision of the old roof being ripped off, the new roof installed, and a bill for double or triple what had been on the contract. I know it's easy to take digital signatures and put them on a new document All sorts of nightmare scenarios kept me from sleeping. As I walked up the steps to my office, I thought about how long it had been since I felt this level of anxiety, the kind that made me feel almost wobbly. I made some calls, and within an hour, we had the contract.
But we still didn't have roofers. They didn't show up on Wednesday, and they didn't show up on Thursday. The materials to do the roof were sitting in the driveway, but no roofers. We began to wonder if this was some sort of odd scam that doesn't get much national attention.
Happily, by Friday the roofers appeared, and they came after my spouse's morning doctor's appointment.
Unhappily, we have our community picnic today, so by yesterday, our neighbors on either side were home. Those houses are vacation houses, and our neighbors aren't there often. I felt bad that our roofing project was going on and bad that it wasn't supposed to be this way. So I apologized, and both neighbors were gracious. One even gave me some of his extra peaches!
The roof shingles are called Arctic Blue, and I can't quite get a picture of the roof that captures the blues and greys and blacks. So I grabbed a piece of a shingle on the ground to try to capture it:
We have a very easy roof, and we predicted that the roofing project would take one day. We were right. By the time the sun was setting, we signed the form that said everything had been installed properly, and we were happy. But honestly, how would I know? My spouse, who has more experience with home repair, was happy and said it was installed properly, so I'm happy. And we have warranties, and a company that's been in business a long time, so if something happens, we should be covered. We have been told that the roof should last 50 years, unlike the super duper metal roof that had a 100 year warranty. It's rather sobering to realize that if the roof does last 50 years, it will likely outlast each one of us.
We still have the trailer that serves as a dumpster parked in the driveway. I am not paying the rest of what we owe on our roof until the trailer is removed. I am hopeful I will not have to make that stand.
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| first morning with the new roof |
We still have a thousand projects before the home renovation is complete, but the biggest projects are done: new windows, new doors, new roof, new HVAC system, remodeled/mostly new kitchen, remodeled/mostly new bathrooms. Last night, as we waited for the roofers to be finished, I looked up our first two houses online. We owned those houses in the mid-1990's. I wouldn't have recognized them, so thoroughly have they been remodeled. The outsides look the same, but the insides are so different. I imagine our house's owner from 30 years ago would feel the same.
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