I put the roof on it today. Grace and I picked up some smoke tinted panels at Lowes on Wednesday night. (It was quite an adventure securing those twelve foot panels to the top of the van and then driving home.... Thankfully, it wasn't a windy evening.)
When we got up this morning it looked like rain. The weatherman promised buckets full of rain too. I was all ready to see how many panels I could get up before the rain hit when I noticed that we hadn't bought any fasteners... I had to go to Nooksack Valley Building Center to get screws. By 8:30, I was up on my ladder and roofing like there was no tomorrow. I kept thinking, "This will be the last panel before the rain hits..." and then I'd do another panel. By 11 o'clock I ran out of screws (the project was a little more "screw intensive" than I had figured...) I went back to NVBC to get screws, found my screws, realized that I didn't have my wallet with me... stopped at the middle school to leave a note for Grace to go to NVBC in order to pay for the screws... and then, back up my ladder...
By the afternoon, the weather had actually cleared up. I didn't know how good I had it with the cloudiness and the cool temperatures... The wind started to pick up a bit and it made handling the panels a little tricky. I was just starting the last one (which I really couldn't have done by myself) when Grace came home. We got the last panel up (I actually had to make one more "screw run" to Valley Plumbing - for four screws!) and suddenly, we were done.
And, this is what it looks like:
Funny story: Norman, who you see in the picture, always insists on being underfoot when we work outside. Three times, I stepped on him as I came down the ladder. Once, he was all sprawled out under my ladder when the ladder buckled and fell on him. As I was hanging from the rafters, trying to figure out how to drop down without hitting the collapsed ladder, Norman looks up at me and proceeds to lay down directly underneath me... I got down without squashing Norman.
