New Roof

A bit of advice--if you are going to build a house, do not use the cheapest builder. He will use the cheapest subcontractors, and corners will be cut, leaving you with costly repairs further down the line.

The roof above our porch has always had a leak. We had our builder send out the roofers the first year we were here to fix it. They filled a few nail holes, and pronounced it fixed. Only it wasn't. This very wet winter/spring forced us to finally find someone who could fix it. It turns out that the roof was not done right in the first place, and it turned out to be quite the process to fix it. The last two days have been filled with the sounds of hammering, sawing, and footsteps on the roof filling my house. When they got the shingles ripped up, they discovered the plywood was rotting and had to be replaced.

So, we got new support braces on our peak above our porch (they were originally done wrong), new plywood, a very expensive water barrier (the roof was too flat for code to have just shingles on it), new flashing (this time installed correctly), and new shingles. We now have a brand new roof that doesn't leak. We had a builder friend in our ward head up the project, and he said it was pretty appalling to see all the things that had been done wrong originally in the project. Trusses weren't even nailed down to the house. And of course, our builder and original roofer declared bankruptcy and went out of business long ago, so we are stuck with the bill. SO FRUSTRATING!!!

Thankfully, we had two days of sunshine for them to get the roof finished (today it's back to raining). We also had two days of sunshine for the kids to get outside and play. I spent my whole time outside with them, trying to keep them at a safe distance from all the construction (they were so curious and really wanted to watch). Yesterday was the last day of school for Savannah and Josh, so we celebrated with a firepit for dinner last night. I had promised them we'd go to the park or the zoo today, but it's raining. So we are spending our first day of summer vacation trapped inside. Hopefully the rain clouds will clear soon so we can get out and do something fun.