Fiddling on My Roof

(Dedicated to the memory of Franny the cat)

I am sitting here on my special bunker. There are the sounds of booms and bangs as the entire building shakes. Light streams into newly formed cracks in the walls and ancient dust and crumbs fall from above and onto the horizontal surfaces in my extra special hidey hole while a cat nervously purrs at my feet.

It is not Paris or Berlin, it is Rusty Hinge Road and I am having a new roof installed.

It all started a couple of years back when we were having a little work done on the house. Part of the work included a new skylight in the bathroom which included a new install on a tiny little roof. The carpenter, who I shall not be recommending upon request, boasted to me that “his skylights never leak,” which I believed, and also served as an omen for future leak problems and a disappearing contractor.
An associate of the same fellow, who I would recommend, in spite of never returning phone calls, , arrived in contractor #1’s stead and applied some goop around the skylight, the good news is he fixed the leak, the bad news is he noted other parts of my roof in mushy peril. Actually the skylight still leaks.

Thus began our search for a roofing contractor.

History and horror stories often indicate that roofing contractors are notoriously slimy. Even folks in the contracting business whom I trusted, wouldn’t offer me any names. So I resorted to the internet, finding a popularly advertised website that rates various local contractors. On it, after paying a fee, I located a company I’ll call “Choice Home Improvements.”

Their representative, Dino, answered the phone himself, made an inconvenient-to-him appointment, braved rush hour interstate traffic and arrived at our door at the agreed-upon time bearing samples and oversized ponce wheels, wearing a windbreaker emblazed with the embroidered company logo.

Dino’s jovial manner along with a scrap-book of awards and accreditations combined with photos of some of Choice’s choicer projects gave us a very warm and fuzzy glow of confidence. His estimate seemed fair. We liked him. The cat liked him.
We watched him as he loaded his samples into his truck. I was ready to write him a check right there, but cooler heads prevailed and we agreed to entertain other bids. So I called around. I asked friends and associates. I contacted trusted tradesmen. I collected a few bids, but none of them gave me the same comfortable confidence that Dino left at our kitchen table. He was firm about his timing, even promising to go over the periphery of the property with a magnet to pick up all the nails. His bid was the best.

So we made the deal and as I type this, a century of dormant house crumbs are bouncing off my keyboard.
He swore up and down that he’d be done in two days and that he’d be there on Tuesday. It rained, of course, so the crew arrived on Saturday – after a couple of perfect days. Meanwhile, I’d used up vacation days that I could have saved up for – well - vacation.

The Choice van emptied out like a clown car and soon the old creaky homestead was swaying under the weight of the handful of brawny roofers, prying and ripping. Soon, two layers of shingles were sliding down big blue sheets of plastic and making the yard look like the ninth ward.

Dino was confident that the whole project would be done in one day, and they were careful not to disturb the nest of robins who’d not asked first before setting up shop in the crosshatch of wires tethered to the corner of the west wing.

As night fell, the roof was not done, but I was assured that it was weather tight.

The forecast was iffy but I was promised an eight o’clock wakeup call Sunday morning.
A mercifully light rain had mocked us by moon light, and I anticipated a much more angry column by sunrise, but the clouds parted with dawn and the clown car arrived curbside. For once we beat the neighbors to the punch, firing up the gasoline powered compressor. Straight from the hymnal of the church of the Rusty Hinge.

By night fall the curbside dumpster was creaking under the weight of a century of roofing history. If you squinted, you couldn’t otherwise tell that there had been confusion, dismay and debris at our little corner of heaven. In their haste to get going, the crew left their magnetic nail picker-upper . So with the cat venturing out of the house after a weekend of being nervously confined to my office chair, I went over the battlefield with the left behind tool. I picked up hundreds of nails.
There is no DNA testing for steel, but by the looks of some of them, I sense that some may have been dropped at the turn of the last century.

The roof looks pretty good, at least from my view of the bunker, where I sit typing as I listen to what sounds like the gnawing of oversized rodents on the wall outside my window. The painters, working mostly in the afternoon, are preparing my house for a new coat of paint and me for a column for next month.

Alas, the sweet cat has departed this life for good, rest well my dear little friend.