Raising the Roof

We can officially wipe one goal off the list as done, as the hard-working guys from Ehrhard Roofing just finished putting the new roof on the house.  No more leaks!

The bad news?  Somebody put their foot through our office ceiling.  Not once, but twice! 

Those wires you see in the picture are the TV, phone and networking cable that we ran throughout the whole house.  It all comes back to a patch panel in the white cabinet at the bottom of the picture.  We decided to use a drop ceiling in this room in case we ever needed to get to the wires for some reason.  So there isn't a "real" ceiling in there.

The aluminum panels are salvagable and we were able to bend them back into shape.   But we lost one support and we're trying now to see if we can find matching paint.  I think we used Martha Stewart metallic copper but we'll have to see if it matches.  I already have to repaint the walls - I really don't want to do the ceiling also!



I was on our roof almost 14 years ago to the day! 

As with all projects on this old house, we found some interesting stuff.  We sign and date everything when we do a project so we laughed when we found the plywood that we fixed the roof with back in 1999.  It's 1/2" and had some damage on the gutter end, so we had the roofers replace it with 3/4".  They also shored up the rafters and put in some additional insulation.  We should be nice and comfy now.

An even more surprising find was this:

It never ceases to amaze me what folks did to recycle back in the day.  This old license plate was used as flashing on one of the dormers.  It's in pretty good shape and is going to join my other old license plates from the 1920's and 30's on the wall of our garage. 

We find all kinds of crazy stuff like this in our house:  old coins, blank checks from the late 1890's, jewelry.  Somebody in the house must have been either a boozer or lived during Prohibition, because the attic was full of old liquor bottles.  The house was split up into 4 different apartments back in the 40's and one of the bedrooms (now our closer) was a kitchen.  Under the linoleum in that room, we found perfectly preserved Kansas City newspapers from that era.  One of the front page headlines reads "Nazis Bomb London".  We got absolutely nothing done that day except perusing those old papers.  I should dig them out and share some of the classified ads with you, because they are quite a hoot.

Til later,