Old Roof

I was unceremoniously woken up this morning at 7:30am by about six worker-looking guys; I let them into the yard, and they promptly drove a dump truck up next to the house, grabbed their ladders, and started picking up my tiles and tossing them into the truck with a great, dog-bark-inducing *CRASH*!  I had, fortunately, apologized to my neighbors about the roofing in advance. :-P

It had been a fitful night of sleep as it was -- our water pressure dropped last night for no cause that we could discover, other than perhaps the construction across the street.  The hubbub of all the guys arriving, plus having to belatedly move our cars, the noise, etc. did a good job of waking me up.  Google hovered around my feet for a few hours; usually he's on a box, or on my lap, or on some soft surface somewhere, but this time he just sat next to my feet.  Jeeves promptly disappeared.

I found it quite interesting that the roofing tiles only seem to be held on by gravity and a few well-placed thin pieces of wood to support the courses!).  I got the guys to hand me about 30-40 tiles so I could save them for a path somewhere in the garden, for nostalgia's sake.  They are, after all, flat and quite durable!

Our electrician arrived (by appointment) not too long after that to install two new mastheads so that we could get our cable and telephone wires up above the ten-foot mark, and become less trouble for any truck that needs to back into our driveway.

Yesterday a guy came by (again, by appointment) to climb up and take the ridge tiles and 'shell' trim tiles from our roof; according to his business car, he buys and sells vintage roof tiles.

While I'm glad that they're not all going to waste, I did check with the main roofing contractor late this morning, and when I confirmed that he was getting $$ for the tiles out of the deal, I gave him a small piece of my mind that he had not mentioned to me that my tiles were worth something.  While yes, he gets credit for having known the guy, it would have been professional to have mentioned "Hey, your roof tiles are worth a bit of money, isn't that nifty?" and offered a 50/50 split or similar, which I would have happily accepted, and thought all the better of him.

But as it is, no...while his roofing job seems ok (from my layman's point of view), I'm not currently inclined to particularly recommend him to others after this.

Okay, trying to think of other, more random topics to distract me from that worry.... it's a bit distracting that the window to my home office here looks out on a patch of sunny ground -- and shadows keep moving across it, as the guys walk around our roof.  It keeps catching my eye.

In more positive housing-related news, it looks like some friends of ours have secured a house a few blocks away from us.  They've been working at it for weeks, but they finally got the go-ahead in the last couple of days.  Kinda cool!

Oops, another meeting -- back to work...