A new appreciation for kneepads: The right tool for the job

A while back, my house was damaged during a big wind-storm. My neighbor had a trampoline in their back yard, and the wind picked the thing up, flipped it, and deposited it two stories up on my roof. Once it was up there, the wind ripped it into a mass of heavy aluminum pipes and springs attached to a wildly flapping tarp, and then took the opportunity to beat said pipes and springs against anything within reach.



I'm really lucky that window didn't break.

But all of that banging around cracked the siding, and helped the wind to rip out some shingles and damage several more.

So this past Wednesday, I climbed up there with a load of shingles and some nails, and started working.

Replacing damaged shingles is actually pretty easy, once you get the hang of it. Use the pry-bar to break the seal of the shingles around the one you're replacing, pull out the nails, slide in the new shingle, nail it down, reseal the older shingles and boom, you're done. Well, you're done with that shingle anyway.

Something I realized, after kneeling on asphalt shingles for over an hour, was that I really should have had some sort of kneepads. I was wearing jeans, but I still managed to rip up my knees pretty painfully. I have a pair of kneepads for rollerblading, but they're hard plastic, and designed to let me slide on pavement without damage rather than cushioning my knees and keeping them from sliding off the roof to my doom. (Doooooooooooooom!)

Something else I realized, was just how well the pry-bar that I was using worked for this job. I could easily slip it between shingles to break the free from the row above them. I could pry out nails from underneath shingles that I'd never be able to reach with just a claw-hammer. It even has a slot along the shaft to slip over the head of the nails and lift them out from way back under the other shingles. If I hadn't had this tool, the job would have been much more difficult, and would have been more time-consuming and probably more painful.

So having the right tool for the job made all the difference. And that allowed me to do take the time to the job right the first time. And *that* is a huge important thing to me. I've done too many rushed repairs in my life, and as a result seen too many crappy-looking poor quality fixed that I wasn't happy with and had to redo later. And I wasn't going to do a shoddy job on something this important.

While I was up there, I noticed that a house down the street from mine had a whole crew of workers on the roof doing the same things that I was, but on a much larger scale. The thing that I observed from that was that "the right tool for the job" for them was a pneumatic nail-gun. :) That sure would have saved me a bunch of time and nail-tapping.

Anyhoo, I got everything done and it looks great.