Couldn't Find the Amish in the Phone Book

It's true, we couldn't find the listing for the local Amish, nor could we find a roofer willing to do the job this year,so we had to do it ourselves.
Now I'm not particularly skilled, nor am I really comfortable with heights, so doing my roof was something I was pretty much dreading all summer. Fortunately, its been so crappy weather wise that I've been able to put it off.
But this weekends brilliant sunshine found me on top of my house confronting my demons.
Fortunately, I was able to enlist the help of my good friend Mike, even though he just had a baby last weekend.
A good thing he was available, because as I said, I really don't have a clue how to put a roof on...or at least I didn't.
So I started out on Friday evening, started ripping the old roof off. This doesn't take any skill or knowledge. I pulled old shingles off for about two hours, finding only minor damage from the storms of last year. I hoped that this would largely be a cosmetic endevour, but just as I was ready to come down, I felt my foot go through the sub-roof and into my house.
As it turns out, there was a fairly sizable hole up there.
At this point my next door neighbour, who actually is a roofer of sorts, came up to take a look. He explained that this giant hole was the result of inadequate venting, and that although my roof was not leaking, that it actually was rotting from the inside. A comforting thought for bedtime.
Saturday morning found both Mike and I up high, pulling the rest of the roof off. This was the fun part...liberating in a way to take the roof off and expose your house to the elements. Of course...once you've started, your committed...no turning back.
My neighbour loaned me his nail gun, a tool that is both very dangerous, but very efficient.
We had the roof completely stripped off by 11 o'clock, and by noon we had installed the two new sheets of plywood, and had packed the immensely heavy 23 bundles of shingles up the old fashioned way...by hand up a very steep ladder.
We got most of the felt down, and were just about to start putting the new shingles on, when my neighbour came over and offered an extremely valuable piece of advise about keeping the new roof square by laying down a border of rectangular shingles first. This is the stuff they don't put on the back of the package. So we did as instructed, and my neighbour even gave us a bundle of shingles to complete the task. He also explained what exactly I would need for venting. Very helpful.
We started out with the new shingles, made some errors with nail placement, but eventually got the hang of roofing with inter locking shingles.
Kira, who until this point refused to get on the roof due to extreme fear, overcame said fear, and with a little bit of help, came up to assist. This greatly spread up the process, and we got about one third of the new roof on before dinner (which was delicious).
Sunday (today) started out with sore muscles, but went smoothly (other than a few trips to the hardware store to get supplies). Long story short...by three o'clock I had a new roof on the top of my house, complete with a ridge top vent. There"s still some cementing left to do, but it was just to hot to make people stay up there.
Note that I only did the top roof. The remainder of my roof is too steep for me to even attempt, so hopefully I can wrangle a professional to replace it sometime next year.
Oh, there still a huge pile of old roof in my side yard to be hulled away to the dump. I think I will save that for next week, you know to kill the boredom.






The happy couple on their new roof (she swears it's the last time she's ever going up there!).