C & W Roofing have been at work for several days on the roof of the front wing of the house on our farm in Young’s Hill. It has been a massive job arranging the ladders to gain access to the roof surfaces, let alone removing the shingles.
It turns out that the sheeting is intact under the layers of shingles, some of which were badly eroded by the concentrated exposure to the sun of a very steep, southwest-facing roof surface. The front dormer is extremely steep, and the south side of it hides behind a chimney rebuilt in the seventies. The fireplace under the old chimney drew well, but zig-zagged its way up over forty feet to clear the roof line. The furnace also had a flue. There’s no way to clean one of those chimneys. Eventually the soot erupted and after a hairy evening Dad decided it had to come down. The replacement bricks started to deteriorate soon after the new chimney was completed, and the thing had been abandoned for years.
The crew worked their way around to the south side of the dormer yesterday morning, and Paul Peters told me that the chimney was too dangerous to work around, so I offered to take it down with the winch. That sounded o.k. to the crew. Paul asked for a couple of planks to put against the back side so that the cable’s pull would be distributed over the entire height, rather than risking cutting through the chimney and having the top half fall over on the roof.
It was quite a job lifting two scaffold planks up there and standing them up against the chimney, then pulling the winch cable up, but there were lots of hands. That makes a big difference on a project like this one. Derek Simpson shot a video of the pull, but it’s only accessible to his Facebook friends at the moment.
Anyway, I had the tractor at idle as we tightened the cable, but the tall brick monolith didn’t move. I speeded up the engine, another hard pull on the clutch rope, and then the whole thing let go, twisted slightly on its axis in response to the hook’s eventual placement at the southeast edge of the chimney, and plummeted like a ton of bricks. It landed precisely where I had planned, with not a brick out of place. Most of the rotten masonry turned to dust on arrival.
Crew members gradually emerged from cover. Everyone was truly impressed by the smash. C&W Roofing owner Rick Warriner and superintendent Greg Cournyea drifted in the driveway just in time to see Derek’s video of the demolition.
I put the winch in gear to extract the cable from the rubble, raised the blade, and put the tractor away. Job done.
Then Paul went to work from a 40′ ladder with hammer and chisel to cut the remaining stub of masonry down below the new roof line. This took several hours of awkward work. The big problem was the heavy flashing around the old chimney, which had been installed above the original steel shingles on the roof. Two layers of shingles above the steel had ensured that no leaks occurred.
When he was ready I cut four 17 1/2″ boards, 12″ wide and 1″ thick, and he screwed them into place. The waterproof membrane stuck down over the fresh wood, and the landmark chimney was no more.
the Walnut Diary 