Flashing

The other day when J was in the attic putting some new insulation up (and thank goodness I didn't have to do that...I have this weird fear of getting fiberglass in my skin)....he noticed that there was a small hole in the sheeting of the roof right near our chimney. We talked about different ways to fix it for a few days but came to the concensus that to do it right, we would have to take the shingles off in the area in question and replace the sheeting properly. We probably could have gotten away with doing some kind of half assed job but we just couldn't do it.

So on Friday, while I was busy dropping off yardwaste and picking up pinestraw and unloading it, J was on the roof getting things going. He carefully removed the shingles (as we didn't know if we could find matching ones) and cut out the section of sheeting that would need to be replaced. In the course of that, he discovered that the reason the hole was there to begin with is because whomever replaced the flashing on the chimney before did a really bad job of it (part of it was aluminum siding not even real flashing) and some how water had gotten below it and rotted that sheeting. We were lucky we hadn't had a leaking problem this whole time in the house.

So after I was done unloading, we took off for our local home improvement store and picked up the necessary items. Amazingly enough, we did find some shingles that matched ours and so we ended up with a pack of those as well. We came back home and J went back to the roof and I moved onto another project. As it started to get dark, we put things away and prepared for the next day.

Saturday, J got up on the roof bright and early and I took care of some other items. We knew it was supposed to rain on Sunday so we were trying to finish the roof up that day for sure. I started working on my yardwork and getting the 39 bales put out. I finished up the yardwork, right at dusk and because we weren't completely finished but finished enough that we could just tarp the chimney and not have to worry, that is what did. Around 11pm it started to rain but we knew that we were okay because J had finished up everything that would be getting wet from the tarp, we really only had to do the cap flashing on the sides of the chimney.

Sunday morning we get up to the news of the horrible storm hitting the East Coast. So many inches of rain expected and severe thunderstorm and tornado watches in effect. We decide to run to the home improvement store since we can't do anything on the roof until the rain stops. We had some returns to do and a few different things to pick up. While we are there, the rain stops...we hurry home because it looks like we have a 3 hour window to finish up. J already has all the flashing shaped and cut, we just need to get it on there and caulked. He starts on it and then asks me to help him so we can finish in time.

So he places and nails them into the chimney and I go around behind him caulking them up with this polyurethane black goopy stuff. It is definitely a messy job but not anything too difficult. We are down to two more pieces when the sky starts to get darker and we can hear thunder in the distance. I tell him that I am getting down as soon as it gets close, because not only are we on the roof of our house during a severe thunderstorm watch, we are playing with sheets of metal and have to climb an aluminum later to get down. I won't even mention the fact that there have been 5 lightening strikes on trees in our neighborhood since we have lived here (one in our yard). Needless to say, we start working much faster. I kept one eye on the storm as we joked about the headlines if we should both get killed up there...haha. Fortunately for us, the storm skirts by us without coming very close although it was a bit gusty and dark off to one side, and we are able to get everything caulked, cleaned up and off the roof before it starts to rain.

Note: While we were up there, I just kept thinking about how much my mom would not want to know what we were doing...