Exterior: Roof, rainwater, paint, etc.

This is a long post covering the changes we’ve made in the exterior appearance of the house here at Terribly Happy: Housepainting, carpentry, rainwater collection, and landscaping. I originally intended to make it a trio of posts, then a pair, but finally decided to leave it in one piece.

When we first saw it in May 2010, the house looked like this.

Great curb appeal—for the color blind. But no problem: It obviously needed a paint job, for which we budgeted from the start.

We also had plans for the roof: We wanted to install a rainwater collection system, which meant replacing the asphalt shingles (petrochemicals in your water! yum! plus all those worn-off asphalt bits gumming up the works) with a metal roof. Before THAT could happen, we had to do some wasp control, and get some carpentry done.

Cleaning out the spaces between the rafters. See the can in my hand? See me ducking? One of the workmen had uncovered a wasp nest.

That wasp nest is a thing of beauty, but had to go.

Our carpenter (Hazen Parsons) and his crew blocked those openings between the rafters so that wasps, birds, rodents, and other critters can’t get in, extended many of the rafters, and attached fascia to cover the exposed ends of the rafters.

The above picture also shows the newly extended roof over the addition; compare with this “before” shot.

That same picture (go up two) also shows no roof overhang at all between the main part of the house and the addition—a really not-smart choice by some previous owner that had left wood unprotected.

Hazen and his crew built an eave there, modified many other parts of the existing roof frame, tore off shingles and replaced plywood on the addition, and stapled down temporary roofing paper on the new construction—just before we received a light mist on 8 Oct 2010.

Later that week, the “metal roof guy” came out with our roof….sort of. He actually came out with a couple of rolls of metal, which then was passed through a unit that formed it into the appropriate shape and width, and then was cut to appropriate lengths.

Then he left it by the side of the house and went away!

We waited a couple of weeks for installers to be available—not many outfits have experience with metal roofs, and it’s really different from an installing a shingle roof. Just before their scheduled start, Hazen et al. tore off all the existing shingles, along with about 43.2 bazillion roofing nails and lots of old roofing paper.

That was four full pickup loads of shingles, paper, and nails.

Then the roofers arrived, and installed the roof in a weekend.

The rain played nice: About 3 minutes before the roofers climbed down for the final time, light sprinkles started. By the time they pulled away 10 minutes later, our first heavy fall rain was underway!

We didn’t have gutters yet to collect that rain, but those went up about a week later, via a gutter-forming “extrusion machine” that transformed rolls of metal into the right shapes and lengths.

By early November, we had a metal roof with gutters, and the rainwater collection project was underway. The groundwater in this area has very high levels of (natural) arsenic, which is OK for irrigating plants but not OK for drinking by humans. An under-sink reverse osmosis system was in place at the kitchen sink, but we wanted to bypass the wells completely for our domestic water supply. I calculated that 8000 gallons of storage would be sufficient to get us through even a remarkably long, dry summer—so we went with 9000 gallons!

Prior to the roofing/rainwater collection project, the north side of the house looked like this.

That’s a 300-gallon(?) fuel oil tank, which supplied the house furnace that lived in that little annex behind that sticks out from the house. We sold the tank and furnace for cheap via Craigslist (and gave away all the air ducting under the house, too). Then Hazen and crew removed the concrete tank support, and constructed three octagonal pads.

Meanwhile, three 3000-gallon poly tanks waited patiently nearby.

Once the roof and gutters were in, Hazen et al. placed the tanks on the pads

electric submersible pump inside the middle tank

connected them below ground

and attached them to the gutters via 3” PVC.

The vertical pipe is a “first-flush” system that collects the early runoff laden
with dust, bird droppings, leaves, etc., thereby easing the load on our filters.

They added an overflow pipe that leads to the ditch along the road, but we didn’t have them bury it yet—some landscaping decisions still had to be made there.

18 months later (!!! Perhaps the neighbors worried that we thought white PVC was decorative), we finally buried it. Dave Shoemaker ran the trencher to spare my shoulder.

In goes the overflow pipe, which drains directly into the ditch.

Then we replaced the dirt

and constructed walkways of 3/8” minus atop black plastic and weed fabric.

This photo also external valves that Hazen added later, so that we can get water easily even when the electricity is down. It also shows the lattice that was constructed by Estevan Slaughter (The Hand E Solution) in winter 2012. In mid-April, I planted vines (grapes & akevia—another edible berry) at the bases of the west-facing sections of lattice. Despite their strange locales in the middle of gravel,

they did great this year,

growing much faster than I expected. In a few years, they’ll provide some serious shade in the summer to extend the life of the poly tanks.

To bring closure to this trio of posts: The exterior of the house was painted in summer 2011, after the roof and rainwater work. We chose a color that blends in well with the vegetation that surrounds us, particularly in the summer.

We’re very happy with how it, and all of this, worked out. In fact....we’re Terribly Happy.