Last summer I re-roofed my house. When I say I did this, I am not employing that conventional transmigration of agency we use when we say we did something because we paid for it. No: I did the work myself. I planned for it, I purchased the materials, and I laid the shingles, with a volunteer crew of friends and family. From the time our roof sprang a leak in early June to the last vestiges of cleanup in August, I was at work on the roof, often through some of the hottest weather southwest Missouri has to offer. If I stress this point, it’s not because I think re-roofing a house is such a notable achievement. After all, people do this work all the time, though less and less frequently for themselves or as part of an amateur, communal endeavor. Re-roofing my house was a notable achievement for me, though, stretching me well beyond my usual areas of competence and giving me much occasion for reflection.
I didn’t want to re-roof my house during the hottest days of summer, but once I was doing it, I found that I liked it. I liked the intellectual challenge of completing a large construction project; I liked the camaraderie of working with my friends; I liked providing for my family in a way that demanded something of me as a man. I am very proud of myself. But if this essay is a bluster, I hope it is at least a contemplative bluster.
Here, then, is the history of my time on my roof.
We purchased our home two years ago as of this writing, knowing that the roof was old, and that our insurance company accordingly wouldn’t offer us full coverage on it. A downpour on the day of our home inspection gave us some comfort—seven inches fell on our town in a day. If the roof held up to that rain, we figured, surely we would have a few years to save up for a replacement out of our own pockets.
Not so. Less than a year after we moved in, the roof started leaking. A patch would be expensive and, likely, short-lived. The quote for total replacement exceeded what we had saved by a significant amount. Without sufficient funds saved to hire a professional roofing crew, our options were limited. We could take out a loan; I could get a second job; or (gradually I woke to the possibility) I could take on the work myself.
I had helped with roofing a few times before. My parents owned older homes and liked to do things themselves, which meant that as the oldest son I had spent many weekends in adolescence serving as chief assistant to my father. I had access, through friends and family, to good advice and the necessary tools. As a college professor, I had the remainder of my summer relatively free, and a few friends with the same flexibility whom I could call on for manpower. All considered, a DIY roof seemed the most logical course. The prospect was daunting—I had never managed such a massive project on my own home before—but what choice did I really have?
As an amateur roofer, the most stressful part of the process was the preliminaries. I had to secure a permit for my project and select and purchase materials: unfamiliar, high-stakes tasks. I had heard dire warnings about the stringency of my local planning and zoning office, so I feared running afoul of them. In truth, they showed themselves to be fairly reasonable, when I could access them. Building inspectors seldom answered the phone when I had questions, and getting a response to a message took days. At one point, pressing up against a deadline, I drove down to city hall in person, two children in tow, to try to secure the answer to a question about materials before spending thousands of dollars on something that might be forbidden by building code. I was not successful in meeting the person I needed to talk to, but I did get his attention sufficiently so as to get a call the next day.
I am a reader of Wendell Berry, suspicious of “labor-saving” devices, with an affinity for hand tools. Yet when it came time to order materials, I discovered the benefits of automation. First, through my brother-in-law who owns a roofing company in another state, I received automated measurements of my roof’s dimensions, produced remotely using satellite imagery. The technology saved me what would have been several hours of painstaking measurement, and most likely significant inaccuracies in my mathematics as I estimated area and pitch. The second benefit of automation came with the delivery of materials. Since I needed around 95 bundles of shingles, each of which weighed close to 100 pounds, I was glad to pay a rooftop delivery fee and to watch two young men from the roofing supply company drop bundles directly on the roof with the aid of a massive boom truck. Much as I value tools that run on breakfast, this instance did seem to me a good application of power, one that spared me from carrying 9,000 pounds of materials up a ladder by hand.
Completing these preliminaries took me an anxious month. The leak had sprung in early June, and my greatest fear was that the project would linger until I had to return to teaching in the middle of August. At that point, not only would my own time for roofing dry up, but that of my helpers. I pictured a fall semester of desperate weekends working by myself while the winter rains loomed.
By mid-July, however, I had the permit and materials in place, and we began our real work. Each morning, I was out the door between 6:00 and 6:30. Fill a cooler with ice and bottled water, lug it to the base of the ladder. Peel tarps off piles and buckets of tools; spread the tarps on the lawn to catch debris. Gather and organize: a pile of shovels, a heap of hammers and crow bars, a line of utility knives. Change out dull blades, put new coils of nails into the nail gun. Drag bundles of shingles into place. Hook up air compressors. Slather on sunblock in palmfuls, and tie on a bandana to keep the sweat out of my eyes.
My crew began arriving around 7:00. From a pool of six local friends (plus my father and brother who came in from out of town to help for a weekend), I never had fewer than two helpers a day, and most days three or four guys assisted me. Our first two days went slowly. The most experienced of us hadn’t roofed for years, and most had never done so at all, so we were tentative, fumbling. Our confidence and speed grew, though, every day. My crew consisted primarily of fellow college faculty members, and it was a pleasure to discover how handy my overeducated friends are. Each one seemed confident with a nail gun, vigorous in tearing off shingles, and skilled at cutting new ones to precise angles on the ridges and hips. Nobody fell off the roof or put a nail in his foot, and I felt that, while I was the foreman by necessity of my homeownership, I was the least skilled member of the crew.
By about 7:30, we would be well into the work of the day. I had usually sweated through my shirt by about this time. The temperatures never dropped below the mid-nineties, though the benefit of such a weather pattern was that we never saw rain, that dire enemy of roofers. One of my crew members, presumably desirous of increasing his own suffering, brought along an infrared thermometer and clocked the temperature on the surface of the roof at over 150 degrees Fahrenheit. The feeling of standing on a surface radiating that kind of heat beggars description. Climb up on your roof yourself some summer day and you will see what I mean.
Roofing with asphalt shingles isn’t a complicated process; it is mostly a matter of strength and endurance. You tear off the old shingles (current building codes don’t allow you to leave them in place) with shovels and pry bars; clean and repair the plywood decking underneath; roll out synthetic underlayment (best) or tar paper (obsolete); then start nailing down shingles in a stair-step pattern. The challenge of the work is mainly its volume and physical demands. If the new shingles weigh about 9,000 pounds, the old more than equal that bulk, and must also be forcibly torn loose from the roof, against 8-10 nails securing each piece. Hundreds and hundreds of shingles must be forcibly removed, thousands and thousands of nails; then thousands and thousands of new nails must be driven, one at a time, into hundreds and hundreds of new shingles. Bend, tear, shove, scrape; hoist, kneel, lean, strike. Over and over and over. As the work wore on, my hands, feet, and knees blistered. My thighs grew so sore from repeated kneeling that stooping to the level of my toddler in the evening brought yelps of pain. I never sunburnt, but each evening as I lay in bed after a day of labor, clean and showered and air conditioned, my skin still felt sensitive and radiated warmth.
We usually worked no later than mid-day, a concession to our amateur status but also good practice in high temperatures, which make shingles tear and stick to one another. At times, I pushed my volunteer crew to reach a milestone before we stopped, but in general I couldn’t ask them to work themselves to the brink of collapse. As the homeowner and foreman, I tried to push myself hardest of all, taking the smallest breaks and taking on the most strenuous and sensitive jobs. I felt it only right. Once a stopping point arrived, we would pile indoors, damp and stinking and grimy, to eat sandwiches or tacos or tabbouleh my wife had prepared and to sit in the air conditioning, shoes off, laughing together about our pain. Lunch eaten, my crew departed, leaving me to put away tools, to take a cold shower, and to plunge into some of the most profound afternoon naps of my life.
A professional crew can re-roof a house like mine in a day, at most two, but for our amateur crew it was ten days of labor. Those ten workdays took place over about three weeks of the summer, each day much like the others in outline but different in its demands: today we have decking to patch with new plywood, tomorrow I have to figure out how to place the flashing around the chimney. The final section of the roof was one of the largest and most complicated, and so our last two days were some of the longest. But, by 3:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday in early August, we were done.
Crew departed and tools stowed, I stood, still covered in sweat and asphalt dust, in the middle of the road where I had a good view of the roof. It looked good. It looked done. I felt proud and relieved, but also strangely let down. I realized I was sorry the project was over.
I would miss the intellectual and the physical challenge of it. Both components of the roofing project rank among the most challenging undertakings of my life. Writing a doctoral dissertation was nothing compared to the complexities of sorting through materials, permitting, and labor as a new roofer. And the physical challenge of pushing myself each day to set a good pace for my crew, through punishing heat and heavy, repetitive labor, ended up more satisfying than any athletic competition or exercise regimen I have ever undertaken.
I would miss the camaraderie. Most of us end up doing our home renovations as solo endeavors, but working on a project like this with others has much to recommend it. The shared challenge of doing a big, hard job together offers a spirit of fellowship that you don’t get any other way. It’s why I would never miss out on helping a friend move—working together with friends brings consistent joy. A big home improvement project, which requires greater organization and greater effort, is even more satisfying. To toil, and work, and think together about a common project and a common hardship is to forge real bonds.
I would miss doing work that asked something of me specifically as a man. My wife and I have a mutual relationship and little interest in defining narrow gender roles for ourselves. She’s no tradwife and I hope I am no paterfamilias. But though I am not exactly a gym rat, our respective physical stature bears no comparison: I have thirteen inches in height on her and substantial advantages in strength by virtue of my sex. My wife is neither weak nor soft; she has given birth to four children without a single epidural. But when the roof sprang a leak, there was never a question about who needed to handle the task. I was needed as a man to employ my masculine strength in an act of suffering service to provide for my family. Men with professional jobs seldom have such opportunities in developed societies today. Certainly, as a college professor, my daily work does not rely on physical strength, endurance, or pain tolerance. I found it bracing and satisfying to be needed, for once, not for universal qualities of competence, intelligence, and care, but the distinctive capacities of my male body.
With the new roof installed, I have full insurance coverage and a warranty on my materials. Should hail or a windstorm strike, I can expect a generous payout, enough to hire professional roofers, with a little left over. Most likely, it will never again make practical sense for me to buy my own materials, gather a crew, and roof my house myself. I have other things I could be doing with my time. In that undeniable logic, though, I cannot help but feel, in some respects, that I will be missing out.
I dedicate this essay with thanks to my volunteer roofing crew: Russ, Luke, David P., David Z., Daniel, Ethan, Bryan (Dad), and Malachi.
Image Credit: Vincent van Gogh, Rooftops (1882)
3 comments
Kursy Nieruchomości
Really love how you balance education with entertainment perfectly
Colin Gillette
This piece blew me away.
As a former roofer, I read this piece with a deep appreciation for the view from the ridgepole, but also with the sharp memory of what the pitch takes out of a man. I loved the trade, but I also know its teeth. I did the job while staring down the barrel of economic ruin, busting my ass to form my own company and make that debt disappear before my own roof could leak.
Because I’ve lived on that edge, I refuse to romanticize an industry that too often treats roofers like dogs, exploiting young bodies for fast insurance cash. The modern trade is heavily financially, driven by corporate contractors and insurance adjusters who treat the actual laborers as disposable inputs.
Now at fifty, my back simply can’t handle the physical toll anymore. When it came time to replace my roof, I chose to hire a younger, ambitious local man. It was a completely honest, human exchange: he did an excellent job for a reasonable price, and he didn’t try to get me to access my homeowner’s insurance to game the system or bloat the invoice.
If we are going to talk about the dignity of manual labor and the places that shelter us, we have to look past the pastoral poetry and reckon with the economic reality beneath it. True localism isn’t just about admiring craftsmanship from afar; it’s about supporting the quiet dignity of keeping transactions fair, direct, and human.
Scott LaMascus
Matt and FPR,
As I read your essay, reversal beeps of a crane are piercing morning quiet in our neighborhood, where houses line the block, each in a different stage of construction. Shingles are being hoisted onto the roof next door, framers are tappets-tapping two houses up, and three up the street, plumbers are laying the blue, flexible lines that mystify old timers as plumbing. On it will go, snaking over the hills of Crosstimbers cleared to make this neighborhood in a rapidly growing city. — To “build” a house these days typically is no Thoreauvian endeavor. In my state, it means van loads of Spanish-speaking workers labor for a large corporation which is building in five large tracts across the central zone of our state, the furtherest 60 miles apart. These are not mini-mansions — our neighborhood ranges from just below median to 200% of median, mixed together. No street without a below media, no block without a 2X. This experiment in neighborhood design style seems to defy the housing logic Cusper’s (my name for late-boomer-nearly-Xers) have grown up with. I’m watching closely, born too late to have enjoyed the assumptions of Boomers, too early to be a “real” Xer. My wife 1964, me 1962. This is our pre-retirement house. Our last, we calculate, before we downsize further into an apartment near our children. Who knows? Life is uncertain. — Your essay gave me so many thoughts I could write 1,000 words, but I’ll stop by saying I dream of laying roofs with my Dad and Grandfather, doing the flunky jobs allowed me, splitting the bundles of shingles into small enough batches I could carry one up the ladder. In retirement, my Grandfather owned a row of “rent houses” like the one he lived in, purchased as his retirement portfolio, so to speak, so there were a lot of roofing jobs — 1,200 square footers. Only my father could tote shingles up onto the roof unbroken. Grandpa could secure a nail with three hits of a roofing hammer (no nail guns). Each of the houses I lived in was “built” by hand — shoveled foundation to last shingle and mud job before “the women” began painting inside. The uncles would come help frame and roof on weekends until the tar papar had been secured against a heavy dew or sudden shower of rain. A salt tablet dispenser lay among the tool boxes and detritus of building — twist lid dispensed one table to be placed in the cheek to dissolve slowly as sweat poured over the men’s belts. — Here I am in a state whose motto is labor vincit omni. Whose? How? Two weeks ago, voters defeated a minimum-wage proposal to pay workers a higher rate, still below the national average. Seven dollars an hour is the current law here. I’m certain no one adult would work for that, but I see the lights on at the construction sites well into the night and on weekends, though the company ensures the sound levels are lower — no blaring songs of Jalisco or Sonora after dusk. The average American? Not sure who that is, but we are definitely alienated from the origins of our housing, as you show so well. –The woman next door complains endlessly about having the warranty team out to her place and I wonder. — Thank you for this memory, contemporary context, and the rigorous thinking behind your essay. Thank you! Kudos.