Put a lid on it

When we bought our house, six years ago, the home inspector told us that the roof wasn’t in danger of imminent demise, but it would need replacing in the next three to five years. This was, by far, the best house we’d seen and I was already in love with it, so I made a note that we’d probably need to get a home equity loan (we were putting a goodly amount down) in order to fix it. This was October of 2007.

Then, the whole, “home equity loan” concept took a serious hit. Uh oh. And New England got hit by a bunch of roof-tearing-up extreme weather, with Sandy and Nemo and Irene. I breathed a tremendous sigh of relief as our roof made it through the winter with no internal rainstorms. We also had two separate spots in the roof with colonies of bats. Great for mosquitoes, but not so great for the attic.

In February, we started making calls and comparing quotes. Our house has a difficult roof – many levels, four stories up, lots of different planes.

We finally settled on Nuza Roofing. They did a lot of work. They removed all the shingles, replaced any rotting wood (including the entire porch roof), put ice & water shield on the entire roof, reshingled, replaced all the fascia (the out-facing boards), put on all new gutters in a different format, repointed the chimney, and put like 28 soffet vents in the roof. Whoof. It took almost two weeks. Every single nail they put in place was hand hammered. They did an amazing job.

So now I don’t have to worry about my roof for like, another forty years! Yay! Of course, they did discover that we need to replace rotting trim on most of our windows (a project we actually undertook once already, to little effect). So it’s not like I don’t have to worry, I just don’t have to worry about the roof.\

So to summarize: new roof. Very expensive, but well done. I have roofer recommendations if anyone wants them!