Funny Homeowner repairs!

Whats the funniest "attempted" repair work you have seen performed by the homeowner? I could probably go on for eternity about all the ones i have seen over the years but i'll stick to the one i saw today and see if any of you guys have some great ones to share. This guy called about a leak on his back porch roof. When i get there he has the ladder all set up and ready to go. My first hint he's already been up there. He takes me inside the added on screened in room on back of his house and shows me multiple leaks not just one. When we get on the roof the first thing i notice is the low slope and it has some unlevelness. Just a 7 sq. straight side tied into the wall of the house at the top. Also has a chimney at the top right and about a 5 foot long section on the left that ties into the steep slope roof above it. He had put some kind of sticky silvery stuff that looked like oversized duct tape lol all around the chimney for flashing and on the left wall and at the pitch change. He had bulled the apron flashing at the top with black mammy where it meets the shinlges ( which did absolutely nothing but make it look horrible) Anywho, most of the leaks were due to the low slope ( about a 3/12 ) and the unlevelness. He tells me the roof was even worse before and that he had torn a layer of shingles and a layer of ice and water shiels and replaced 80% of the decking but then he just shingled right back over it ( thus not changing much of anything ( it needs modified ) and he reused all the flashings. The apron flashing was fine but the chimney flashing was horrible and not even sealed at the top where it meets the brick. Also he had installed the shingles underneath the wall/step flashing on the sides of the chimney and on the wall on the left. lol Also there were not one but TWO satellite dishes bolted straight down into the roof with black mammy smeared all around them. I gave him a bid to replace with shingle grain surfaced GAF Rubberoid Mop Grade. Replace all chimney, wall and apron flashing and recommended he let us take the two satellite dishes off the roof and he have a satellite installer come out and put them on the side of the house using brackets. $2,650 which i thought was fair including all that flashing work but he nearly fainted when he saw the numbers. Theres no telling how much he already has in it. But he did say that was his favorite part of the entire house and what i quoted to do is what he wants done to it. So time will tell i guess! lol

Well, this is not about a repair but i thought i would share it as it was quite a shock at the time. Back around 1994 I traveled to Louisville, Kentucky to work as a sub-contractor after a major hail storm. I got directions to the "landfill" and took off with my first load. Upon arriving I thought it strange that this "landfill" was in the middle of the city. Then i pull up to this mobile home office on the right with a CAVE opening directly in front of my truck. lol I paid the man and he said just drive into the cave and follow the signs. I went through all manner of curves in the darkness and finally got to the back of the landfill, Uh i mean cave and they had lights set up and bull dozers ready to roll. At the time i was using a 3/4 ton pickup truck with high side boards. We had a chain attatched to a pallet and hooked up to the bull dozer and they pulled the loads off that way. Well, I hooked to the dozer and the idiot driver of the dam thing didnt give me time to jump in and hold the brakes before he just snatched off the load super quick and then pulled his dozer out from behind my truck super fast with load attatched. In the process he had snatched park completely out of my transmission and my truck went flying backwards into utter darkness! lol I went to look for my truck in the darkness and bats were flying around everywhere. Also I can hear from above, "Welcome K-Mart shoppers we have a blue light special on isle 14" lol Turns out this cave, fall out shelter whatever it was had a K-mart department store directly above this portion of the cave. They came with lights and eventually we found my truck resting up against a large mound of old shingles with no further damage! lol I will never forget that experience! lol

This building was an incinerator building for the city of Portland.

It was built to be a burner, all masonry, steel trusses and roof framomg with open spaced clay tile wired onto steel angle iron. Totally fireproof and if powder snow blew in every couple of years, it was no big deal, the inside was all cement and masonry.

They closed down the burner and some genius in the city decided to take advantage of the vollume of the building and built 4 floors of windowless storage for all their important and historical archives. 8 years after the conversion, they bid it to remove the tile, attach 2x4's to the angle iron and resheath it, add underlayment and relay the tile.

When I went into the attic, it was the biggest Rube Goldberg moustrap of tarps, buckets, aquarium pumps, extension cords and power strips you could imagine. Tarps were draped over the trusses , through the trusses, forming little rivers meandering in all directions. The employees in the office below had a series of things to plug and unplug depending on the severity and duration of the rain.

There's no telling how much it cost to have city engineers construct it all.

We had done a roof on a Gov. grant years back on an old 2 story house where the roof had a leak and the fellow didn't have a ladder so he went upstairs and cut a hole in the ceiling so he could climb out to put a tarp on the roof. A couple of years past and the tarp failed with UV damage so the water was pouring through the hole he had cut in the roof. He propped up a bathtub against the wall to catch the water (he started to redo the upstairs bathroom and lost interest) so everytime it rained he run upstairs and bailed out the bathtub with a 5 gallon pail and dumped the water out the window. If he wasn't home the tub overflowed and leaked into the kitchen below. The old house was so wet that we could feel a small electrical shock when installing the metal step flashings on the roof and the gutter guys got shocked when screwing on the new gutters.

Did a reroof once that had three teensy weensie skylights. They were home-made oneX curbs with pyrex dishes turned upside down on them and mastic seals to the shingles. She wouldn't hear of parting with them so we soldered up llttle saddles with curved corners and slightly tapering sides. She was a lot happier than we were, but you sometimes gotta do what you gotta do and we were happy to make her happy.

Another not so funny experience. Big time real estate operator asked me how much I would charge to write up a spec for a large condo development. I told him $5000.00. "Why so much" he says. Broke it down this way - $200.oo to just blink @ the roof, and $4800.00 insurance to CYA. He puts a builder confidant in charge to replace dead level roof w/ tapered job. This is the same guy who tried to relieve the ponding on the roof by cutting extended vent stacks down to the roof level, which screwed up the plumbing fixtures. We submitted a bid on tapered, but he gave it to a guy who was 50% less. Months later he wondered why contractor couldn t get manufacturers bond.Guess what I found - the stupid contractor installed 1" insulation sheets (2 x 4) in a plateau fashion w/ feather strips separating the levels. Ponding occured in each and every one of the sheets. Result: humongous lawsuit among partners. Knew them both, and happily never got in the middle.

Cid and Willie. Those are terrible. What are these people thinking?

Good thing that engineer didn't invent a really big umbrella you could fit through a vent hole, we'd all be out of business.

An engineer homeowner had his roof blow off at a can style attic vent. He did not want to go up on the 5/12 two story roof so he engineered a solution. He took his daughters sponge bob umbrella, stuck it through the opening, opened it, and taped it to the trusses.

In 2002 I worked in a developement with three phases staggered over a 4 year period. There was this house I passed by, just before the entrance, every time I worked in the developement. It has a large blue tarp covering the entire roof (about 14 sq) and wrapped over the gable end and eave, nailed with battens under the overhang. (overhang was about 6 inches0. On the 4th year, the tarp on the front split. Just kind of assumed they will be putting on a new roof sooner rather than later. Two Years later (working part time for the roofing company) I was dipatched to do some repairs in the same developement.

As I passed by, the owner had a brand new tarp covering his entire roof! AGAIN!!!

I just thought of another homeowner that called me out to give him a bid on a complete roof job that he had started all by himself. Upon arrival i noticed all the safety ropes he had them all over the place. He had spent quite a bit of money on this stuff. It was a 5/12 slope and 1 story. lol He had been working on it for two weeks. He was nailing over 2 existing layers thus breaking the code. He had about 6 squares nailed on a 35 sq. house and he forgot to stagger them. So all the butts lined up straight up the roof. lol He hired us to roof it and we did the job in one day. The guy was astonished. He's been referring jobs to us for years every since! lol PS ( After we finished the job he gave me all the safety equipment he had purchased ) Ropes, harnesses, anchors, pulleys, etc... lol

Why just limit it to homeowner repairs. How about so called roofers, where instead of being funny is downright tragic. Bid on a roof replacement, where supposed legitimate competitor came in 30% less. He got the award and promptly subbed it out to a gypsy. There was an A/C duct the entire length of the roof inches above the deck. Took a shortcut and rapped the entire duct w/ visqueen and cemented same to the BUR. Drainage was now impeded by this. Furthermore at the RWC he flashed the drain w/ the top of a paint can. And to top it off, he removed roofings prior to an evening rainstorm. Net result - $120,000 in damages. Its anything but funny, for all the professional roofers ultimately pay for this abomination thru increased premiums in their insurance policies.

The thing I see on a pretty regular basis is homeowners making temp repairs with plastic garbage bags. You use what you've got, I guess.

wow ole willie your homeowner strikes me as the kind who doesn't know when to fold em'. i bet he'll just keep trying by himself, but i hope i'm wrong. i run into people like that every now and then.. they like to believe that they know as much as you, even though this is what WE do every day. hopefully he will come to his senses and just let an actual roofer get the job done.