New Roof and Al Gore Visits

Riddle:

What is the best way to guarantee that you'll hear the words, "Your roof won't make it through the winter"?

Answer:

Think of how much money is THE MOST you are willing to sink into your house this year on a remodel. Then spend double that. Once it's done (or close to it), you'll get to hear those words. Like magic. If you're looking for a new roof, you should seriously try it.

We did.

Here's the before picture of our roof.


Looks aside, (because, really, I could spend pages just touting how beautifully stunning it is) I know what you're thinking.

"What the blazes were people thinking building a flat roof in a place where we get this much snow?!"

But it really wasn't all that bad. The builders of our home really planned ahead. They looked out for us. In the... um, we'll call it the "attic" for lack of a better word, they only put R11 batting. Kind of like the stuff you have in your walls, only thinner. Code states that the minimum attic insulation is R38. Most people have 50ish.

That's where their planning ahead came in.

See, with R38 or higher, that snow would have come down and piled up on my roof, possibly putting it in danger with that much weight resting on it. By putting in only R11, they guaranteed that enough of our home's heat would make it through the roof, thereby melting every snowflake as soon as it touched the roof.

I know. Downright genius.

We'll be forever grateful. Plus, we got something else cool out of the deal. As soon as we had the old roof torn off, the new roof built, and insulation filling the attic, something happened. Apparently, the amount of power and gas needed for our city dropped drastically. So much so that Al Gore personally noticed the change. He had his aides track down the difference, and energy drops led them straight to our house.

That's right. Straight to our house.

As in AL GORE came straight to our house. Here's a picture of him thanking me from the bottom of his heart.


And here's the certificate he presented us with.


How often do you get a former Vice President of the United States of America coming to your house to give you a certificate? Almost makes putting up with the flat roof for sixteen years worth it. That baby's getting framed and mounted over my fireplace.

If you're the type of person who likes befores and afters, these are for you.

A different view of the "before."


Mason Jasper hard at work, making our chimney taller.


Bringing in the wood for the new roof.


Framer Ben hard at work with friend framers.


From the backside of my house. Doesn't it look like we took off my house's hat, exposing his little bald head?


The beginnings of our new roof.


A view from the backside. See that gravelly stuff? That was the top of my old roof. See that grayish stuff at the bottom of those boards? That's the sheetrock in my kitchen (you can even see the electrical wires leading to the light above my sink). That space inbetween the two? THAT was my attic.


End of day one.


Framer Ben putting up sheeting.


Framing done!


Delivering the shingles.


Roofer Ron hard at work, trying to beat those storm clouds to the punch. (Many thanks, Ron, for winning that race!)


Our old roof. Or as we like to call it, HPOC. As in, "Huge Pile Of Crap."


Backside view of HPOC.


This, times four, in a seven-and-a-half hour period....


Turned HPOC back into this:


The siding isn't happening as quickly as I had hoped, and I don't want to wait around for a true after picture. Here's the next best thing:


And then, as it neared completion, I ate a fortune cookie. This is what it said:


'Nuff said.

Phobiamares

I might have mentioned before that I'm a teeny tiny bit claustrophobic. I trust telling you this information because I know you're not a criminally insane person looking for ways to torture me. (And if you are, you should know that I'm deathly afraid of being fed creme brulee on a beach chair next to the ocean.)

On the weekend, we close our blinds AND our room-darkening curtains. Ahh. Sleeping in pitch black is so blissful. You'd think I'd have had dreams of sleeping like the dead and awakening fully rested. Instead, I had a phobiamare. It was smack in the exact middle of the night. That time when you are so dead to the world that raccoons could sneak into your room and pilfer all of your sparkly things and you would never notice.

That time when a nightmare can sneak into your dreams, and you definitely WILL notice.

The nightmare was short... Probably only a few seconds. I was plopped into a metal room I had never been in before with my back to the door, which was unfortunate. Half a second later when it slammed shut, plunging me into total trapped darkness, I had no idea where it was.

I gotta say, it freaked me out a little.

And by "a little," I mean that I full-on panicked. Being trapped is WAY worse than spiders. I jumped out of my bed (in real life) and felt around for the door. I started with the wall just two feet from my door... except I searched the WRONG direction (which really isn't all that strange when you think you're in a room you've never been in before). Of course the door was frighteningly absent. I could feel the all-out-crazy-person-panic bubbling so very close to the surface. So close, that I knew that any moment I would scream with all I had, and then proceed to escape by any means necessary, including beating a hole through the wall to free myself. I was trying desperately to hang on to that last shred of sanity and luckily, I was still able to form words.

Loud words.

"I'm trapped! And I'm about to loose it!"

To which my husband (in real life) said, "What do you need me to do?"

"Help me find a way out of here!" (I apologize to the people who live on my street and the street behind me if I woke you up.)

Like a knight in shining armor, he leaped out of bed and opened the door before stumbling back into bed (exact middle of the night, remember).

The light in the hall sang to me like a thousand angels. I ran into the glorious light of the moon, sank against the wall as I fell to the floor, and breathed heavy for 15 minutes before I could bring myself to return to bed.

The dreams I have that spill into real life usually involve spiders coming in hordes to crawl on my bed way more often than being trapped does. (Which brings to mind one of my favorite mental images of all time. One that involves my mom getting wrapped up in her blankets and dreaming that someone broke into the house and was pinning her down at the EXACT same time my dad was dreaming that the bed was covered in spiders, so he was standing on the bed, alternating feet in an attempt to not leave either one on the bed for more than a few seconds. This, of course, happened right when my mom opened her eyes to find that someone was, in fact, on her bed. Although I totally and completely understand their dreams, I will forever giggle every single time I think of it. Sorry, mom and dad.)

So I blame my phobiamares on genes. That and the Red Vines I gorged myself on right before bed.

What about you? Do you have phobiamares that you just can't shake when you wake up? Go ahead. You can trust me with your secret. If I'm going to torture you, I'll probably do it by chanting a never-ending story.

A Distinctive Thumbs Up

We decided our house wasn't distinctive enough.

It didn't have that little something that set it apart from the others. The thing that made it recognizable from a distance.

So we did something about it.

We decided that the easiest way to go for that special something was to raise our chimney to a height that would make it more noticeable.

The gray kind of makes it fade into the background a bit too much, though. It doesn't make the chimney stand out nearly enough. To remedy the situation, we're thinking of painting the bricks an alternating hot pink and lime green. Or possibly going for a rainbow look.


And now, if you get a chance to drive by my house, you can just consider yourself getting a "thumbs up" from it.

Because it's encouraging like that.