Sunday, July 02, 2006

assessing the damage (and the roof cont'd)


They messed up my lawn.



They squished my hostas.


But they removed 5-6 layers of old roofing material and laid the first layer.

It's mostly an annoyance about the lawn. I finally had a really pretty nice looking lawn and now I have had a setback. They did take precautions- laying down a tarp of sorts, but evidently some of the materials were not lawn friendly and this is the result.

I appreciate everyone's supportive comments, but I don't blame the roofing company for this- it kind of goes with the territory. Roofing is a nasty job- especially a tear off like this. They did try and the damage could have been worse.

Now we need to address the parapet walls around the roof- they are not in great shape. The roofing compay wants to cover them up with roofing material so they can finish the job. Our masonry company says whatever the roofing company says is okay, but we don't completely trust this- he hasn't even seen the walls in question after all.

A new masonry company sales guy came out and said, "Oh, this entire thing has to be completely rebuilt and it will cost you $6000.00" Yeah, right sales guy. Soooooo....Steve called the Masonry Association and they gave us the names of some consultants, who for a small fee ($250) will come out and give an "objective" opinion as to whether the walls can be repaired or need to be entirely rebuilt.

Until this question is answered, our roof completion is on hold. Honestly, where is the pride in workmanship sometimes? Everyone just wants to move on to the next job. What about doing a good job on the current one?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

roofers do roofing and masons do brickwork and the twain shall never meet. The roofers may have pride in their job but parapet walls aren't in their job description so don't expect anything outside of their scope of duty.

Don't worry, in 6 months you will have forgotten all about this and moved on to yet another project.

Jocelyn said...

The roof is modified bituman, which is a 4 millimeter rubber membrane that is torched together and then painted with a silver aluminum coating. What you see in the photo is a 43# felt base sheet - the actual roof is not on yet.

Jocelyn said...

anonymous- don't worry- I'm not worried!

I do think you can sometimes find contractors who will consider other elements of the structure of the building than their own area- but it just is not too common. And no one cares about your house the way you- the owner does.

Jocelyn said...

M- regarding insulation- we will be insulating from the inside as the ceilings are off now.