Ugh..... roofing

Cleaning up the yard after re-roofing the house has been a major PITA. It would maybe be a less objectionable job if the weather would just cooperate a little bit.

 

Ok, the thermometer is just below the steel roof of the porch, so maybe it reads a bit high. Just to see how much it might be exaggerating I brought the little indoor thermometer outside to compare.

Yep, it really IS 90 degrees in the shade! And would you just look at that humidity?! Gosh, I really need to get out of TN before I melt!  Where was I.... Oh yes, the shingle clean-up. I had a guy lined up to come tomorrow morning and haul them to the landfill for me, so I had a deadline to get them all picked up. I'm a procrastinator by nature, so I actually work best with a deadline. lol  I borrowed the neighbor's steel lawn tractor cart, took down part of the dog kennel fencing in the back yard so I could drive in and started in very early in the mornings. After 10AM or so it was just TOO hot to work on it until evening, and then I only had a couple hours because it gets dark so early here. Probably a good thing, because my back was not happy at all about all the bending over and lifting. I'm happy to report that after several days of working on it I've finally finished the job.

 I somehow neglected to take a Before pic, but here's a During pic... you can see from the dead grass how large an area I had already cleaned up. (Yes, that's a really big dog house, I have a Great Dane  lol)

And a couple After photos!

The bottom one is where we had to open up the skirting to get at the plumbing for the bathroom remodel, and in the process found where the previous owner had stored a ton of old fiberglass insulation. Cleaning all that out from under the house was an entire evening's work by itself. Again, the area with nothing green growing is where the shingles were laying after the tear-off.

And here's the offending pile of no-good, dirty, rotten shingles! There are 36 bundles of them, or at least that's how many it took to replace them, and there's 25 shingles to a bundle, roughly 900 or so. Well, it would be 900 or so if the majority of them weren't in pieces. I picked up easily double that many "things" off the ground. Oh, and they weigh in the neighborhood of 3200 pounds. No wonder my back is unhappy with me!

 I actually finished last night, but by the time I returned the neighbor's cart it was too dark for photos. Today was a do-nothing sort of day because my back is really bothering me. My most strenuous project for today was to check on the progress of the baby bluebirds in the nest box on the porch. I'm happy to report that they are doing great! Both parents are in and out all day long feeding them. Here's a pic from 10 days ago, and one from today. It's hard to see the third one in both pictures, but he/she is in there. They've grown a bunch, their eyes are open and their feathers are growing in rapidly. They will be fledging before too much longer.

And here's the dutiful parents. There's an extremely large number of some sort of centipede-like insects in the yard this year, and they seem to be making up the majority of the babies' diet at this point. After yet another trip to find food and bring it back to the nest Dad was panting and seemed to be feeling the heat and humidity as much as I was. I can't imagine how hot it gets inside the nest box for the babies.