So I consider myself a moderately handy guy who takes on some pretty impressive tasks around the house. (OK, sometimes not so impressive) That being said I must have had a fairly substantial brain flatulence as I will explain.
Our house needs some significant repair on various issues but this one seemed relatively tame to repair; or so I thought. If you ever actually look or pay attention, for that matter, to your roof, you will see various items protruding from it that are fairly important to it's health. One of the first things that many roofs have are attic vents that keep your attic, in the South anyway, to under 200 degrees in the summer. Another feature that our house has is a couple of plumbing vents that protrude. These are simply 4" PVC pipes that connect to your plumbing system to allow ventilation throughout. These pipes have what is referred to as a boot that slides over them to both fasten them to the roof and prevent leakage during various weather events. They do their job but after a little over ten years mine are beginning to crack and allow water to leak down to cause a wonderful work of art on the ceiling that my wife mistakenly calls a stain. OK, enough background on the so called plumbing vent.
Here's what I tried to accomplish yesterday. I'm a man's man and I can erect a 23 ft extension ladder and climb up on that roof and handle such a minor repair right? I thought so. When the last thing that's said by your lovely spouse is where are all your important papers before you head outside it tends to give me pause. So anyway, I open the crawl space under the house cautiously as every time I do this I discover a new species of spider. I manhandle (ya right) the ladder and flip it around on the ground to, hopefully, wipe off all unwelcoming critters and their houses and their eggs and well you get the picture. I walk this ladder over to the back of my house or I guess you could say it walks me over to the back of my house and I carefully set it up at just the right angle as to not do a John Belushi and kiss the ground.
I get my caulking gun all ready for it's task and a few other essentials and start my trek up to the belfry. As I begin scaling my gutter, which by the way I am proud to see has not needed cleaning since I put caps on it, I look up at this vent. It looks innocent enough only about a third of the way up the roof. Did I mention I have a pretty severe pitch to my roof? Did I also mention that it's a pretty long fall from the gutter to the ground and that fall would also include rolling down an embankment into briers and all other types of foliage where I might just as easily never be found? The good news is the fall would be softly broken by a wood deck I have my grill placed on so if the fall doesn't do me in the sudden stop might do the trick. I'm sorry for the digression. Oh one more thing is it's about mid-day and my roof is black asphalt shingles. I slowly place my hands on the shingles and think, "hey this isn't so bad". I begin to slowly and deliberately move up the roof feeling pretty good about things until one of my feet slips just a tad on a shingle and I have a tidbit of a fatal vision but still I persevere on. I eventually make it to the holy grail. I have these pretty impressive knee pads on but I'm afraid the pitch was so severe I didn't trust going onto my knees. This wouldn't have been a problem if not for the increasing heat of the shingles on my palms. I quickly look at the rubber boot and determine that for now caulking around it would stop the leaking until the boot can be replaced. When I say quickly I mean a matter of a few seconds. My hands just as easily could have been on hot coals. So the caulking job was quickly completed and now for the tough part; the descent! I am basically doing a spider man impression trying to come down this asphalt hell and making it to the top of my ladder without doing a pole vault over and down to what I've already described as less than hospitable.
OK, I made it, of course, as I would not be putting a comical spin on this quite as quickly had I not. I did learn a few things from this escapade. Number one is to NOT scale a roof in the middle of a hot day. Two is to understand what pitch is on a roof and make the proper accommodations for it. Three is to make sure you indeed do have all your important papers available should you attempt this feat in the same manner in the future. Finally the thing I really leave from this experience is roofers really do earn their money!
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