Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I got woken up earlier than I was ready for this morning becuase of banging and scraping and footsteps. When I climbed out of bed, I saw a whole bunch of guys on the roof -- mostly the roof next door, but they were walking on mine as well...

Several months ago my roof was re-covered by a handyman my mom knows, and a friend of his. (The same pair who painted the rooms on the third floor and are going to be doing more work on the house.) They added a new layer of tar-paper on the third-floor roof and added a fresh coat of black goopy stuff to that and to the second-floor roof. (No smelly melter-thingie on the street, just buckets of cold stuff.) What they're doing next door is a lot louder. I went for a closer look...

They've removed all the tar from that roof, taking it down to the bare wood planks. (Not plywood sheets; planks. This is 18th19th Century construction. [Edit: typo]) By the time I thought to grab the camera and then got distracted by feeding the cat and bringing in the mail, they'd gotten most of it covered up again with these thick black rigid sheets/slabs of something. I saw a roll of tar-paper lying on my roof, so I figure that's the next step, and then either sealing the seams of the tarpaper with goop or spreading a uniform layer of it. But it was interesting to see the bare planks. I wonder what the criteria are for deciding whether to simply add a layer or to strip everything off and start over.

I'd been thinking about roofs anyhow. When the handyman (his day job is, IIRC, teaching, and he's a hip-hop musician, and he's got a couple of investment properties that he does his own work on -- he's working on this house because he can help my mom out by doing it cheaply, not as a business) was here on Sunday to scrape wallpaper off the walls so he can paint the stairwell, he commented that he was really glad my roof hadn't leaked, because two roofs on houses he owns had leaked even though he'd gone up there a few times each to fix them, and he would've felt terrible if my mom had had to call him because of a leak here.

An upcoming project involves reinforcing my kitchen floor.