A couple of guys showed up yesterday morning to start working on the nails which were blasted through the roof deck under the eaves. They showed up in a small sedan, so had to ask to borrow one of my ladders. Moments later I heard hammering! Wha?? I went out and found them at the garage opening pounding the nails upward, then pounding them down flat. No, no. No! I managed to get the idea across that the nails were to be cut, not flattened. (English was definitely a second language.) They didn't have the nail cutters with them, and so, departed.
They came back around 11am and began work in front of the garage door, and boy, did it go slow. All they had was a pair of 7" flush, end-cutting, nippers. It took two hands and a lot of determination to cut any one nail. They had a couple thousand to do. It seemed like forever, maybe an hour, before they were done with the lower front eave and began working the back. I stepped out to watch a moment and commiserate with them as best I could.
The thought hit me that if we could extend the handles, it wouldn't be such hard work. I mentioned this to the better speaking of the two and went in to rummage around under the workbench, where such junk tends to accumulate. Nothing there, but when I went to report, there were a pair of 18" pipes on the handles! I'd forgotten that some pipe scraps were stored outside in plain sight just a couple yards from where they were working. The effectively longer handles really sped up the process. Instead of 15-20 seconds per nail (and a lot of effort) it was just 5-10 per, until the ladder had to be moved. In the time it took to do the lower front they were able to clear the low rear eave, both south side rake sections, high rear eave and north rake section. Amazing.
I had the impression that the rest of the crew would be here around lunch to silicone the solar footings. That confirmed my thought that silicone had not been put down under each foot. They didn't show until near 4. The nipping had been completed only 20 minutes before.
Now only affixing the plywood sheathing to the solar, and painting under the eaves remains to be done.
I'm happy with the appearance and finish of the roof and will be recommending this company, with a few caveats, to some neighbors who have the old T-loc style shingles.
2 comments:
It almost sounds like a little 4 ½ “ grinder would have sped up the job even if they couldn’t get all the nail tips off and had to do some with the cutters.
We have two Mexicans here at work than have been in the states for over 14 years and we find that we have to use a lot of sign language or demonstrations to get them to understand. And it’s funny that they will look for the easiest way to do a job but then they have to do it over so that it’s done right thus taking twice the time, and twice the work.
We have that same nail problem under our eves, and every once-in-a-while I think “I need to do something about that”, but I have sort of put it off until I retire. I want to cover it with plywood sheeting and paint it. Now the sheeting will have to have air vents but it would be neater. The house on Stambaugh had its eves covered for a finished look and that’s where I got the idea. Also it makes painting much easier, instead of painting around all those 2X4’s, just painting the flat surface would be less time consuming, you know what I mean?
Indeed I do. It's funny, but I don't like the look of soffets on the houses in the neighborhood. I much prefer seeing the rafters. Granted it's more work to paint them, but one could have some real fun and paint the rafters a different color than the under eaves. Recall of some of the paint jobs on Victorian style houses seen in ski areas.
A grinder for the nails sounds like a good idea until it slips and gouges the underside of the roof decking or a rafter. We weren't talking about tips showing through, but 3/4" of each nail. Grinding would have been slower, I think, and potentially more damaging.
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