The big story was roof and gutter area around our bay window. A week or so ago we noticed that we could see into our attic from the outside. I am not a home maintenance guru, but I believe that is usually an undesirable housing attribute. It appears as if the gutter and attached fascia and soffit are drooping which in turn leaves a gaping hole into our attic. Dawn had mentioned our predicament at work and a couple of her coworkers offered to come out a look at it. Actually they assumed it was just a gutter problem and they offered to come out and fix the situation on Saturday morning in exchange for a meal.
They showed up Saturday morning and looked at the problem, gave me a crash course on what a fascia and soffit is, and declared that the situation is much more serious than they had initially imagined.
My favorite part of the morning was when everyone took turns looking in the hole in our house. I wish I had thought to take a picture of it. Before, when I had looked into the hole, I thought: “Whoa, a hole. I bet this doesn’t belong here..
Eventually I settled on the thought that I wished construction objects had metadata associated with them. Wouldn’t that be great? I would have been able to look at the lumber around the hole and look at when it had been constructed, who did the work, and what it thought it was supped to be doing. That would have given the situation some context. If nothing else I would have known who was responsible for the work and I could have dragged them back and asked what the hell was going on with my soffit area? (I bet nobody likes to a get a call where someone demands “what the hell is going on with my soffit area!?!”)
Dawn’s coworkers spent a goodly amount of time up on the ladder evaluating the problem. In between the “they were crazy if they ever thought this would actually work” and “why the hell would anyone building something like that” they pointed out the problem was that really there wasn’t anything attaching the soffit to the roof…so our problem was just a matter of time. Most likely the other corner will soon follow suit (oh boy!)
Their opinion was that it would probably be best to repair the situation from above…where the roof is. Meaning that part of the roof would have to be temporarily removed. They recommended having a hail storm and fixing this problem while the roof was being replaced. The possibilities of fixing it from below were a bit more dodgy, there isn’t a lot of space to work in and it will involved dismantling the often talked about soffits and such. Either way they said it was out of their league and something we should get an honest to god contractor to look at. Now we just need to find an honest contractor. In the meantime we’ve propped up the soffit on the corner that is falling. Bricks and a 2x4 holding up your house….how ghetto is that?
4 comments:
When Bill says "a week or so," he actually means a month or so. He's leaving out the part where I called a contractor to look at it and had to take time off work to wait for the guy to not show up. I even called and had his service page him when he was 15 minutes late to see if we needed to reschedule. An hour after that, I called again and told them not to bother coming over. They left me a message DAYS later not apologizing and offering lame excuses.
Also, the guys from work pulled several pounds of gravel out of the gutter and suggested that we have an insurance representative take a look at the roof to see if that was the result of hail damage and if it needed repair/replacement. One of them just got a new roof this way after a storm that came through a couple months ago.
Oh really a month? Seems like plenty of time to post all of that IN YOUR BLOG.
I enjoy the board holding up the roof. You just need to decorate it somehow to make it look intentional. Throw some sort of tacky seasonal decoration up on it and you're good to go.
Maybe you could add some Christmas lights to the 2x4. Festive!
By the way, as an official "Metadata Librarian" (I love my title, half of the people have no idea what I do), I highly recommend attaching metadata to everything. Wouldn't life be so much easier? Especially when it comes to people. For instance, you would definately be able to find an honest contractor more easily if every contractor had metadata attached to them, such as "last botched job" and "number of no-shows in the past month," I could think of all sorts of categories that would be useful. Ahhh, to dream.
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