16 July 2015
Sonny and Ian put on
nearly all of the shingles up to the tops of the lower level windows on the
west side of the house. Jim Laflam
stopped by mid-morning to inspect work done since his previous visit last August. Chree sorted the contents of several more
boxes into size categories, chanting all the time, “Use more 4’s, use more
4’s.” (Translation: we are awash in
shingles sized between 3½″ and 4½″.) I
helped with the sorting, made any cuts desired by the stapling team, and also
used a stapler for awhile. After lunch,
Sonny and Ian set up staging, attached the next run of Home Slicker®,
and were about to venture higher with the shingles when Sean stopped by. Sean
recommended that we install drip caps over all the doors and windows, something
that has to be done before the next shingle course is put on the west
wall. After much discussion (I can be
twice as hard-headed as anyone Chree knows), that recommendation was
accepted. Sonny and Ian will procure the
necessary material at Goodro’s tomorrow morning. In the meantime, they started work on the
south side of the garage. As Sonny got
to the third course in the area between the kitchen and half bath windows, I
remembered that we want to but a hose bib there. So I cut through the shingles in line with
the wall that will separate those two rooms and installed the 5/4 x 5½″ x 4¾″
KOMA® block on which the hose bib will be mounted. To verify that the block was mounted in the
right place, I drilled a hole through the center of the block and into the
wall. The bit kept spitting out sawdust
and never “broke through” into air. No
sign of the bit’s end inside the house, which one might expect with a 9″ bit
and a 7⅛″ total wall thickness. “Hmm”,
says Sonny and I together, “something ain’t right”. Being nobody’s boobies, our next step was, of
course, to use Sonny’s 12″ bit. Same
result. At this point Sonny did the math
and figured out that, with the house main level floor 11½″ above the garage
floor and the shingles starting 2 inches below the latter’s elevation with a 4¾″
exposure, we were drilling into the 2x8 sill plate. Which meant that the KOMA®
block had to be moved up two courses and all the shingles damaged by my
surgically precise cutting had to be ripped off the wall and replaced. Larry Kaufmann (owner of Long Ridge Concrete,
who did our foundation work) came by to see the crack in the north foundation
wall that appeared over the winter. He
will coordinate repairs with Sean.
