In the last week, we’ve had two days worth of work. Unfortunately, weather and holidays cut the rest short. We resume on Monday.
But, I do have to say, the two days have seen major progress – like beams! Day 1:
It seems like not much work for the hours they were here, but I’m assuming that propping it up properly can be a pain.
One of the photos, you’ll note, is of dirt on the patio. This may end up being a lingering problem. See, our old patio had no rise from the ground at all. That means every time it rained, mud would cake onto the patio. It’s actually a real pain to clean off since you can never quite get all of it if it’s dry, and you risk getting mud on yourself if you use water and walk through it to clean it. It would appear it’s back, though much less so than previously.
There are a couple possible factors in this unexpected problem (the concrete guy said this one would fix the problem of it being too low), and only one can be fixed by us. One possible source is the walkway that connects to the patio from the side of the house. It is also too low and lets mud just run freely down it with a little stream of water. The other potential factor is the neighbor’s yard. After seeing all of our work, they had a giant tree removed by our same tree guy the day they were prepping our backyard. Because there’s a slight hill, every time they’ve done work in their backyard, we get extra mud. So, we can eventually pull out the walkway at some point, but we’ll likely end up with the lingering extra mud problem for a while.
On Day 2, the extra supports were completely removed:
And, perhaps more importantly, the half of the roof that was cut short to accommodate a tree that never should have been there in the first place is being extended out to match the other side. Yay!
I also spoke with the contractor today about the roof. He was going to try and find matching shingles, but we asked him to go ahead and price out getting shingles for the entire patio roof and the cost of having him do the whole thing rather than an odd patch. It’s a reasonably small area, so it shouldn’t be too much more. Even better, it doesn’t obligate us to do the entire roof right now since you can’t see the shingles to the rest of the house from the back. So we can put off the main roof replacement for another year or more without worrying about matching shingles again.
My father had a similar runoff problem from a neighbor; the quick and dirty fix was put a shallow flower bed along the chain link fence on that side of the yard and use slate shingles as borders. A neighbor had their aging slate roof replaced with asphalt shingles and I was able to scrounge enough uncracked shingles from that to use. Along the back of the flower bed I ran a power edger set to full dept and pushed the slate shingles into the slot, with about 4″ above grade, overlapping them like roof shingles. That directed the runoff into an area near a downspout from his porch. I dug a trench to the street, buried 4″ pipe, and put in a flush surface drain feeding the 4″ pipe a few feet “upstream” from the downspout connection. The yard stayed reasonably dry after that.