Weekend Plans Post: The 20 Year Roof

I’ve heard that there are lists of the most stressful things that a person can go through. The top three things all involve the death of a loved one. The fourth thing?

Buying a house.

We bought our house about 19 years ago when it was a little less than a year old. It was probably the most stressful thing that we’d ever done together as a spousal unit. Getting a loan was stressful because we didn’t have the 20% down payment and we thought that that would be a dealbreaker but… no. The mortgage broker asked me what I made and Maribou what she made and crowed and did some quick math on a calculator and told us that we qualified for about twice what she and I had hammered down was our maximum price. “But we only have about $5000 for a down payment!”, we protested and he laughed. “Save it! Buy some furniture instead!”

In that moment, I knew that we were in a bubble and that it was going to pop any day.

But we hemmed and hawed and figured out that we were qualified for house loan and then we started looking and OH MY GOSH HOUSES WERE SO EXPENSIVE. We finally found one that was nice, with a deck, and was walking distance from Maribou’s job and a light driving distance from mine. And it was $20,000 more than our desired price! Holy cow, I walked out of there feeling so ripped off… but Maribou was happy with it, and I was happy with it, I guess. It was about 4 times bigger than our first apartment and twice as big as our previous apartment and we couldn’t believe that we had so much room to play with. So many walls that could handle a bookcase! We could sit at the table! We could cook at the stove! WE COULD HAVE COMPANY!

And, as the years passed, we filled the walls with bookcases and got to a place where we couldn’t believe we ever thought the house was huge. But we had a deck. And a 20 year roof.

Well, we had a windstorm back in December that was absolutely awful and, wouldn’t you know it, a 20-year roof is good for about 20 years. A little less if you have a windstorm from heck.

And so we (okay, Maribou) had to deal with getting roofers to come over and give us an estimate and to have insurance give us a much smaller estimate. Maribou did the admirable job of not only coordinating everything but actually getting these two people to talk to each other in a three-way call instead of using Maribou as a go-between.

The roofers told us “take down your pictures on the wall, take down mirrors, anything that dangles loosely”. I figured that they were saying that as some sort of legal liability thing. You know, like the disclaimer before Jackass. But we took the art down anyway and got ready for them to do their thing.

Holy cow, they weren’t kidding. It sounded like a bunch of 5 year olds were handed hammers and 2x4s and asked to share their best impression of what roofers would sound like. The house rattled and shook, the cats were terrified, they had to wheel in a dumpster to have a place to throw away the old roof before putting on the new roof… all sorts of “holy cow, I never knew that home ownership was so very complicated”.

And they finished up exactly one day before the snowstorm rolled in yesterday. The roof handled it like a champ.

And that’s as much excitement as I need for the next 19ish years.

As such, this weekend will be spent under a quiet roof.

So… what’s on your docket?

(Featured image is a roof. Photo taken by the author.)