I am shingling a garage...

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
2 car detached. 650sf of roof. Into my second week. Might get it done this afternoon. Typing this because I was on the verge of heat exhaustion by lunch time so I'm drinking lemonade and getting my body temperature down a bit so I have the energy to make lunch. Forget soldiers and cops and supermarket clerks during a pandemic, you know who deserves thanks? People who put roofs on in 80 degree sunny weather.

Actually, I was a little bummed by the weather report for last week. Shingles were delivered Monday morning in a downpour and it was supposed to rain pretty much every day. But it didn't. The occasional drizzle but it stayed mostly dry. But it was cloudy and cool enough to let me work. I didn't realize how important that was until...Saturday or Sunday. And actually Saturday was supposed to rain like a bastard. It didn't. It is supposed to be raining right now. It isn't. I guess I'm not really complaining, but I was kind of hoping it would rain as I was finishing up to knock temperatures down and let me work a bit more before lunch. I've got three 3 tab shingles I could've nailed on before having to nail on about 3' of flashing but the last 5 shingles I nailed on were absolute torture so I wasn't about to break out more when I was so far out of gas up there. It's going to be interesting--right down to the wire on if I bought enough shingles. Well, push comes to shove, they should have them in stock at Lowe's. I can buy 1 last pack if I have to.

Well, feeling almost human enough to whip up some lunch so I'll be going.
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Went back to finish up. Ran out of shingles when I was almost to the ridgeline. If I hadn't had any damaged shingles and the guys that did my chimney hadn't helped me get the first bit set up (chalklines, etc) I *might* have had *just* enough shingles to get done. As it was, I had to run to the hardware store and the rain that was supposed to happen all last week finally stopped holding off and came down. Still, I was able to get to the ridgeline so it's watertight, it just needs that cap row so high winds don't rip off the top row of shingles.
 

Knight Templar

Registered User
Well a few years ago (about 10 or so) my brother-in-law and I reroofed about one third of my dad's house. It just about killed me though the temperature was only in the low 80s at most. My blood sugar plunged to 67 by lunchtime, the lowest it ever fell to in the middle of the day when I wasn't ill.

Then it took me months working on Saturdays only to haul off the old shingles and other roofing material with dad asking me every Saturday when I was going to be finished.
 

jack

The Legendary Troll Kingdom
I remember when the house I was living in finally got reshingled afte the floors got damaged from the leaks whenever it rained. Seemed to take them forever, but the new roof looked great.

When they were removing the old roof, they discovered that the frame was infected with termites. so that was a mess. Glad I moved out of there finally and into a newer apartment.
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
The garage is shingled. Worked through the weekend to reduce chance of getting rained on. Ridgeline went better than I expected. Also used more shingles than I expected. Would've run out regardless. Luckily Home Depot had the brand and color in stock.

So the past couple days I've been doing the chores I'd ordinarily do on the weekend. One of those is bookkeeping. And I feel about the way Paul Newman did after he ate around 38 eggs. Or the way I did after shingling a garage by myself: sick and tired. All there is left is balancing my business credit card, but it makes me ill just to look at it--even though I know it should be relatively simple and fast.
 

The Question

Eternal
Shit, now I have to pay attention to what I read in threads like this, owing to the fact that I'm at least on my way to becoming a homeowner. o_O
 

jack

The Legendary Troll Kingdom
If I ever need renovations, I'm flying Volpone to Vermont.
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Next miserable nightmare: They had a 20' circular "above ground" pool at some point. So I have a foot deep 20' circular hole in my yard. Add in a high water table and clay soil and I have a duck pond and mosquito hatchery all but maybe 2 days that I've been at the place (it actually dried out twice). And yes, there were actual ducks in it this spring. After calling the insurance company and finding out they didn't particularly have a problem with a decorative fish pond, I selected a part of the hole to develop for that. Then, when I was having my chimney repaired, I noticed the dozen plus 5gal buckets of busted brick and mortar and asked the crew what they'd be doing with that. A brief conversation later, I had around 60 gallons of masonry for base fill in the hole. After they finished the job and I was settling up with their boss, he mentioned he was demo-ing a chimney nearby and wondered if I wanted that masonry too. Stopped once I had the hole filled nearly to the top.

Yesterday the landscape company delivered 4 "scoops" of topsoil to the driveway so I spent the afternoon laying out old fence boards like a track around the hole so that I could use one of them 90 gallon wheeled plastic trash cans to shovel dirt from the pile and dump it in the hole. (After first digging down at spots in my future fish pond so it would be deep enough for the fishies when the weather gets cold.) It wasn't fun, but I'll take it over roofing. (You don't fill a 90 gallon can--it would be too heavy. As it is, 20 shovels of dirt barely comes up to the top of the wheel and is still really too heavy to easily work with.)
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
My bad. *6* scoops. Had another look at the hole this morning and decided to just suck it up and order another 7 scoops. The place is basically Swamp Castle. Even if I don't need it all for The Hole, the area behind the garage is low enough that it floods when it rains, there's another hole next to the driveway, and I can always improve the slope on one side of the house. Unfortunately they won't be able to deliver until Saturday *again* so I have to work on a weekend *again.*

Today I did some desk work and then decided to mow the lawn (because really, I need to mow the lawn at the other house, but I hate shuttling the mower around, so I mow, leave the mower, and mow again before bringing it to the other location). Then I had a little over an hour to kill. So not really enough time to go mow the other yard so I loaded up the mower and some other stuff I need and came in here to clean house.

Or drink Kool-Aid and fuck off on the computer. I forget which.
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
For as much guff as I give Highway Castle, I'll give him credit for moving when things weren't working where he was at. I was living in Portland, Oregon and the situation got impossible. Neglected road infrastructure meant it was an hour to drive anywhere at any time of the day (exaggerating a little, but not much), NIMBY home construction made it so, while I could have probably gotten a loan for a home, prices had gotten to the point where I wasn't willing to buy a home there. So I moved to Kentucky. Got a house closer in in a better neighborhood that was twice as big with twice as big a yard for half the price I sold my Portland place for. But getting into real estate investing has been painfully slow. And I'm really starting to hate this house. I'll like it when it's done and (hopefully) there's a check in my mailbox on the 1st of every month, but I don't want another place with this many headaches. The problem is, I fucked around so long that it's hard to find a place for the amount of money I want to spend unless it has even more headaches than this place. But I don't want to go back to working for someone for a living.

I mentioned this on Facebook and one of my acquaintances from Portland bitched about how he couldn't afford to buy a home in Portland.

Of course I told him, years ago, that Portland was doomed and if he wanted a future, he should get out ASAP. And of course he told me all his family and friends were there and he liked it there so he didn't want to move. So when he bitched about not being able to get a loan for any kind of home in Portland I smiled and said "Gee, that's a bummer." I'm done trying to convince people to do things for their own good. They get 1, maybe 2 bits of advice. If they ignore them, I just humor them about how their lives suck.

I mean, my life is far from perfect and I could still fuck up and find myself wearing a barrel on a street corner with a cardboard sign, but at least I've been willing to try new things when the current thing wasn't working. My only regret is sometimes it takes awhile. I did have someone tell me in 2002 that Portland was doomed. But on paper it still made sense. Nike. Tektronix. Columbia Sportswear. Hollywood Video. Leupold. Crimson Trace. Uncle Mikes. Mentor Graphics. There were jobs. And back then you could get a 500sf studio apartment downtown for $500 a month. The year before I left a 350sf apartment in the same building was going for $1350. And after applying for about my 3rd job at Leupold and not even getting a phone interview--IN SPITE of having an acquaintance in the company, it was time to move on. I knew the place was doomed in 2009. But the Columbia Gorge is so beautiful I tried to stay. And actually succeeded for awhile. So maybe I can't blame anyone I've tried to talk into leaving. You can't leave until you're ready. That said, I've got a mid-career level experienced friend who can't afford a house and lives paycheck to paycheck. She's also underemployed. Told her she should leave, but she always finds an excuse not to...

I love alcohol.
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
So it came time to lay down a liner for the fish pond. First off, apparently I can't read a tape measure because a 10x25' plastic sheet didn't even cover a tiny slice of the circle, so clearly it has a larger diameter than 20'. The 7 additional scoops are in the hole. Bought a wheelbarrow and I gotta say, it sucked slightly less than using a garbage tote. Definitely worth $80. That said, once I got *that* in the hole, the water still covered the entire circle. But only barely. And I cut a drainage channel that helped get the water level down so dirt was poking out. I'll be listing the bugger ASAP, but as things dry out a bit I'll be monkeying about with slopes to get drainage. For now I shot for getting the dirt perfectly level because that's what you're able to do with mud. But once things (hopefully) dry a bit, I'll need to angle some of the dirt so the water flows towards the low spot in the yard. Unfortunately there's no sewer drain there; it happens to be right behind my garage, but you work with what you've got.

Oh, and putting a liner in for a pond? It sucks ass if said pond is already full of water. What I should've done was get in the crawlspace and take apart my sump pump and pump the water from under the liner onto the liner. But somehow that seemed like more work than farting around, trying to get plastic to submerge and get water on top of it instead of under it.
 

jack

The Legendary Troll Kingdom
It's easier to drill a hole through the bottom and insert a drain with a seal (like a dry well) if you want to drain it first?
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Oh, there will be no drain on this pond. This is going to be totally redneck. It's having a hole in the backyard and dirt costs money, so if I make part of the hole a pond I need less dirt. So I gave it a kind of kidney shape, dug some spots deeper so the fish have a place to hide if it freezes bad in the winter, and put a 6mil plastic tarp in it to keep it from drying up too badly (it only dried up maybe once since I bought the place, but with my luck as soon as I get something with fish and plants and everything, we'll have a record drought.

Since it is a rental and I also don't want to spend money, The Plan is to get the right mix of plants and fish that Nature will keep the pond clean and functioning. Goldfish are cheap and don't need a lot of oxygen (or much of anything else). They eat mosquito larvae. Plants give them a place to hide (and another food source) and clean the water. The plants get nutrients from the goldfish poop. Going for the natural ecosystem rather than anything with pumps and filters.
 
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