What happens when nearly 140 inches of snow falls in the span of 2 and a half months? There's lots of snow everywhere. Like on the roof.
Snow rakes are a nifty invention. Jeff gets ours out every weekend. The problem is, that it doesn't reach to the second story. Jeff gets on the garage roof and gets what he can, but there are still spots that are unreachable unless he bought a 400 dollar ladder (of the kind we had to leave behind 2 moves ago, in Cincinnati) and crawled out onto the second story. Do you know Jeff? This is not a good idea. Murphy's law says that if Jeff climbs up on a 2 story ladder onto an icy roof with 2 feet of snow on it, he will come down with a broken bone. Or 5.
Yesterday, Jeff was going through our file cabinet and shredding old papers we didn't need. (Funny aside: Anna walked in and asked what he was doing, and he told her he was shredding things he didn't want anyone to see. Her eyes got wide and she gasped, "Do you mean like robberies and stuff?!" I'm not sure why her immediate conclusion was that her father is secretly a thief). He went to get the vacuum cleaner to clean up the tiny shreds and discovered the carpet was wet. We looked up at the ceiling. Nothing. We felt the walls. Nothing. We looked at Biscuit, who didn't look guilty. Plus, it didn't smell and it really was too big of a damp area to be Biscuit. And it was the wettest right up next to the wall. Jeff tried to see what was going on from the outside and couldn't tell. Whatever was going on, it's the melting snow's fault.
He called around today to see what it would cost to have someone completely shovel the roof area he can't get too. The bidding begins at $375. And most people are backed up for weeks. I volunteered to go out and do it, and Jeff assured me that Murphy's Law applies to me as well. Not that I wanted to really go up there anyway. But I don't want to pay someone else 400 bucks to do it either.
I tried to cheer Jeff up and tell him about an NPR broadcast I heard on my way to run this morning about how expensive housing is in Europe and how grateful we should be to have our house. He kind of growled at me. I'm sure he's tallying the other snow damage: driveway re-sealing, fence repair. Not to mention the small fortune we already spent on the snowblower and whatever this roof escapade will cost.
Snow is pretty, but it's expensive.
3 comments:
Oh yuck. I can tell you that the $400.00 will be wisely spent. Perhaps you can relay to Jeff that it took $30,000 to fix our leak after it was GUARANTEED that the house didn't leak...maybe he'll stop growling now :) Ah, homeownership. So wonderful.
There is not a day that goes by that I don't look at apartment complexes and think, I wish. Homeownership is a pain sometimes. :(
Sorry to hear about the ice dams. They are really a nuisance. We bought a snow rake cause we have problems on the north side of our house. This has been such a crazy winter! The groundhog said Spring is around the corner though.
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