47 Nails

Oi vey.  Saturday was so busy. We worked and worked and worked.  But first, here's our new roof!!

It looks nice.  And I like the grey doors better with this black roof.

As usual, I learned something from this home improvement project.  I learn something new every day.  1)  Pay the money for the roof guys to do the demo.  You won't regret it.  2)  If you do your own demo, use a tarp on which to throw the old shingles. 

If you recall, we had two layers of roof to remove - cedar shingles on top of green asphalt.  My dad and hubs removed the cedar shingles and just threw them onto the grass.  When the professionals came, they laid out a tarp (kind of on top of our cedar shingle piles) and threw the green asphalt shingles onto the tarp, then shoveled the shingles and debris into their dumpster thingey from off the tarp.  Any small debris was then kind of slid into the dumpster.  So smart. 

By Saturday, all of the cedar shingles were either at the dumpster or in the bed of Ben's truck, so I raked the area where Dad and Ben had dumped the shingles, and I ended up picking up 47 NAILS.  (Yes, I counted.  Sadie was helping me, and it made her more happy about helping me if we kept track of how many nails we retrieved from the grass.)  These nails could have punctured my little children's feet and shoes!  Ben had actually stepped on one.  He hurried and jerked his foot up, so luckily, the nail only punctured maybe 1/4 of an inch into the ball of his foot.  But still.  (And yes, he got a tetanus shot before he left for China, so he's good.)

So now ya know.  Use tarps if you demo your roof.

We had two windows where the wood was warped and needed to be replaced.  Ben replaced and painted the wood on this window (he still needs to caulk it):

And this window...oh, what a mess:

It turns out that the outside trim was fastened to the inside trim.  So, long story short, Ben ended up kind of jacking up the inside of our house.  Here's a piece of the messed up wood from the outside of the window.

And look at what the process did to the inside of my house.  Ben accidentally ripped a huge chunk off our newly-painted wall:

I was like, duuuude.

Ben was able to attach the new wood outside, but we didn't have time to paint it.  And now it's been raining for two days.  The wall still has a chunk ripped out of it.  And the inside frame is sitting on top of our armoire, like so:

Our living room is so awesome.  Everything in disarray, boards everywhere, holes ripped out of walls....  ay-ay-ay.

Gage says hi to all of you:

My job Saturday (besides picking up 47 nails) was to scrape and sand the trim on two of our doors.  The paint had been chipping and looked poorly.  I think it's super fun to scrap paint chips off surfaces.  It's my new favorite hobby.  I'm serious.  It's extremely satisfying.

And then Ben painted said door frames:

They look much better.  And yes, that's a pink blanket posing as a curtain inside our kitchen window.  We're awesome like that.

No scrapeage was needed on the front window frame, but Ben gave it an extra coat of paint for good measure:

(He's so spazzy.)

Such a good boy, protecting his head when he's outside.  I'm not as diligent about skin protection as he is, but that's because he looks like a lobster after five minutes in the sun.  He's very fair-skinned.  The finished trim on the dining room windows:

I also scraped, sanded, and painted the soffat and fascia.  Look at all the colors I scraped off on this big paint chip!:

That soffat has been sea foam green, dark purple, brown, and off-white before!  Crazy!

This part of the fascia hadn't seen much paint action because the cedar shingles stack up so highly on top of each other, so it was mainly unpainted wood.  I painted it - it still needs caulking where the metal white stuff from the roofing meets the wood:

See?  Pretty fascia:

Of course my kids were really into helping us.  Which, in kid language, means stealing our scrapers, climbing up the ladder as high as they could and jumping off, and any other distracting procedure you can think of:

Yep, Gage was wearing his parka and zero undies or pants.  We're white trash.

Micah wears this part of his Halloween costume all day and all night, every day:

And he is a picture ham, like Gage.  He loooves to have me take pictures of him, and then look at them.  Cute little towheads of mine.

Rest your heads close to my heart
Never to part, towheads of mine... :)

Just a little variation on a song from....what movie??