These Hombres Don’t Look so Bad

I feel like I’m in prison.

Last week on Friday, at around 7:30 a.m., a truck arrived unannounced with a load of shingles. The company that owned the truck called the company I hired to put a roof on my house, and that company called and woke me up when I was trying to catch up after sleeping badly. The shingle people needed help getting through my gate, and the driver did not have the gate code even though I had given it to the roofing company.

This was the start of my roof adventure.

I had to order a roof because my “25-year” shingles were starting to fail after 22 years and change. Shingle life estimates are kind of a joke. Something to be aware of when you order your next roof. When they say 25 years, hope for 20. If you look around the web, you will find sites saying shingles last this long or that long…unless subjected to things like sunshine and hot weather. Which means the figures they like to quote only work if you build your house inside another house. Roofs get hot even in places like Michigan.

I dressed myself reasonably well, taking my time because I hadn’t caused the problem, and opened the gate. The driver stood around with a phone in his ear until it closed. I had to call the roof company and make them call the driver.

When you bring a truck through a self-closing gate, you don’t stop halfway through and play a round of tiddlywinks, but that’s what this guy did. I had to keep using the remote to keep my gate off his truck.

Obviously, he is not a very good driver. I’ve had a semi come through that gate with no problems. I’ve had big box trucks come in. UPS comes in every week. This guy was afraid he would hit something. He kept saying I had a little gate. It’s like 12 feet long. How long is a big gate?

I told him you don’t show up early in the morning at someone’s gate with a big delivery without calling first, and I told him he couldn’t play around while using the gate. These things are pretty obvious. What if I had been out of town? He gave me an attitude, which was amazing. He also made excuses. I don’t know how a person like that survives in this county of pleasant, respectful people.

The roofing company told me its crew of people with questionable immigration status would arrive on Monday for a two-day job. Then they would take a break on Tuesday for some kind of mandatory company meeting. Then they would come back on Wednesday and finish up.

It is now Friday afternoon, and I’m pretty sure they’re going home in three hours with the job unfinished. There is debris all over the yard, including a whole bunch of nails. I don’t want to go outside until the nails are picked up, and I am using the car as little as possible in order to avoid a predictable conversation about tire repairs. I think they’ll finish on Monday evening.

Last night, I saw a mouse in the downstairs hall. Mouse infiltration is one of the problems I expect to get rid of by fixing the roof. They found a way to get in, and the roof is the only possible location. I kill a couple of them every month. I would guess this one came in while the roof was opened up, or it was here before the roofers and was scared out of its usual location.

I grabbed a flip-flop and went after it. I was going to crush it like a cockroach.

City people are very concerned about humane treatment for mice. They even buy obscenities like live-release traps, so mice can get a nice meal and then run right back in their houses. I don’t worry about how mice feel. Not very much, anyway. I’m not willing to leave little trays of antifreeze out for them to drink, because it kills in a painful way, but other than that, I’m up for anything. Snap traps. Poison. Stepping on live mice when I find them in glue traps.

I have stomped on live mice, and while it’s no fun, it’s humane and really effective.

My wife is on the same page here. She says that in Zambia, she has shoved furniture against the wall to crush mice. She imitated their little squeaks for me.

The mouse ran into my laundry room, so I baited two traps and left them in there. Then I stuffed a towel under the door to keep the mouse from leaving the room. When I got up, the traps were empty, but I found half a peanut on the floor.

I really hope the peanut didn’t come from a secret huge stash. My friend Mike stayed here for a long time, and I kept telling him not to take food upstairs. Then weeks after he left, I found an enormous bag of peanuts, open, by his bed. I could not believe it. I threw them out, of course.

For all I know, the mice took half a gallon of his peanuts and hid them in the walls.

Once the roof is sealed up, I figure any mice still in the house will die of thirst or by being crushed or poisoned.

This house and the outbuilding had four ridiculous skylights. I’m going to guess a woman had them installed. Women are the ones who like extremely troublesome and impractical home features that look cute. For example, they like carpeting. If men really ran the world, every kitchen would have stainless steel on the walls and, in the floor, a drain with a garbage disposal.

Two of the skylights were in the workshop. Explain that to me. Skylights provide nearly no light in a workshop, they tend to leak and cause sheathing rot, and flying bugs like to fly up to them and get trapped. Then they make noise. I told the roof people to board the roof up. No skylights.

The house had a skylight in an upstairs hallway and an upstairs bathroom. I considered getting rid of both, but I finally said I would keep only the one in the hallway.

You never, ever put a skylight in a bathroom. Water condenses in the little drywall shafts under the skylights, and then you get mold, which you have to keep chasing with chemicals. I doubt any heterosexual man has ever asked for a bathroom skylight, unless he was trying to impress a woman.

Yesterday I saw that both skylights in the house had been replaced, even though I had only paid for one.

Okay; fine. I told them I would let it go. I can always get rid of it later. The up side is that I don’t have to put a new ceiling in the bathroom.

They swear the new skylight is way better than the old one and that it will never cause problems. I have doubts.

I think I should put some kind of frame around the bottom of the shaft and put a piece of diffusing lens in it. A diffusing lens is a piece of clear plastic that blurs things. You’ve seen them in fluorescent fixtures. A lens would keep steam out and end the mold problem. I could install the frame with Velcro so I could pull it out and clean the lens if dead bugs appeared in it.

I can test my theory with some plastic material from Home Depot and some double-sided tape.

I can’t wait for these guys to finish. They start hammering at 7 a.m. The other day, I almost jumped out of bed.

I want them to get out so I can start doing what I know I’ll have to do: raking up nails they left behind when they raked up nails. This is as close to a certainty as anything can be. I don’t think any roofing company has ever failed to leave fewer than 30 nails behind.

I’ll have to go out and wander around with a magnetic rake. Being me, I already have two of them.

I also need to redo my Starlink dish mount because they boarded over the place where I had it.

They were nice enough to wait as long as possible to remove my dish. I didn’t know they had removed it, though. Starlink makes a huge fuss about how you have to have your dish in the middle of a flat square-mile field in order to get an unobstructed sky. The roofers left my dish lying on the roof facing more or less sideways, and I still had service.

This is good information to have, because it tells me I don’t have to do a great job when I put the dish back up. Instead of a long pole mounted through shingles, I should be able to use the tiny, pathetic, four-legged base Starlink gave me. I could even set it on the roof and put a sandbag on it to keep it from moving.

The roof people told me how horrible it was for my roof to have a dish mounted on it. Whatever. They have a new thing called “sealant,” and if it doesn’t work, I’ll know, because I can go into my attic and check the roof under the mount.

They think I should have a pole installed in my yard. Yeah, I want a $500 pole plus an expensive trench plus expensive holes in my house plus expensive cable. Or I can use my $40 mount right where it was last week. Or just stick the portable base up there.

Now they’re telling me they’re cleaning up and expect to have their dumpster trailer out of here tomorrow. They claim they will rake for nails now and then again tomorrow. Can it all be true? I feel like Joe Biden, waiting for the go-ahead to leave the basement.

When they’re gone, I can get the yard fixed. I can get the pool leak fixed. I can have the shutters painted.When you own a house, the roof is the main thing you need to look after. Everything else depends on the roof. I think a good roof and termite protection are my most important home-maintenance items.

Roof leaks lead to wood rot, termites, bugs, rats, black mold, and wall and floor collapses. As the roof goes, so goes the house.

Now I just hope none of the employees were casing the place.