My dad is in his 60s with two replaced knees and a house he’s built and added to for 30 years, so it’s kind of a DIY artistic and architectural clusterfuck.
And one his skylights, which weighs about 60 pounds, was leaking and he needed my and my brothers help to reseal it. Because hurricane Ida is about to dump a ton of rain on them, it needed to be done now.
That involved me climbing a 15 foot ladder and pushing the 60 pound skylight from beneath, up off the lip frame it sits over, while he (sitting on the roof with a safety harness tying him off to the house) replaced the flashing seal. So it was me pushing up the front edge of the skylight and keeping it from sliding off the roof to smash ~25 to 30 feet below us on the forest floor, while he messed with and fitted the flashing.
I got the lifting job because my brother is short and my dad isn’t physically fit enough anymore to balance on a ladder and move weight around like that. His knees just won’t tolerate it.
That was the easy part, and took about 10 minutes of me lifting and lowering the skylight, holding it and bracing it from below while he worked.
The actual pain in the ass part was actually getting it to lower back in place correctly, because now the skylight (which already had a tight fit) was jamming on the new flashing AND was cock-eyed sitting on the frame it slides over.
By now I’m drenched in sweat because it’s the Deep South and his wood shop is hot as hell, my arms and shoulders and back are burning from the effort of lifting and supporting that skylight multiple times as he works and tests the fit….and best of all, my personal phobia, the skylight is crawling with at least 5 different varieties of spiders. Because he lives in the middle of the deep backwoods.
After failing to get the skylight to sit properly, we almost lose it at one point. My dad has basically nothing to brace against on the roof, so he can’t exert much force from his side, and I can’t shove the skylight into position from the bottom, just up. At one point when we’re trying to push it into place, he loses his grip on it and it almost starts sliding free before I grab it and just kinda throw everything I have into it to get it back into position before it takes me off the ladder with it. I may have even roared. At this point I shout at him through the skylight to get out of the harness and put my brother in, because my dad is not strong or stable enough and if he goes off the roof it’d be a disaster, harness or no. I’m having to use my head, shoulders and back to get enough leverage to even lift it up at this point, with most of my upper body in the skylight because I’m fatigued. I can’t just lift it up with all my strength or it goes right off the roof. I need to lift it *just* enough, which is harder than it sounds. I’m covered in 30 year old forest grime, dust and cobwebs, sweat pouring down my face. The spiders just watch me and try to stay in the corners. Im close enough to some I can see their mandibles.
My brother gets hooked in. By this point I’m panting from the effort and the heat. I’ve been on this ladder with my arms above my head in some configuration for over 30 mins. My brother gets in there and, after deciding we need another rope to secure the skylight since I, a guy on the underside of the roof am the only one who can keep it place and I’m getting exhausted, we finally figure out that I need to lift it from the bottom edge of the skylight while he pulls it forward with a pry bar from the top edge. It’s an even more awkward position for me on the ladder since I have to do it from a lower rung and use both hands on the skylight to get any leverage.
Finally, after a couple failed attempts and some more dicking with the flashing, we combine our efforts the right way and it finally crunches back down into its original position.
It never fails that when I visit my dad and he needs help with something around the property, it’s both way harder, awkward and dangerous than I’m generally comfortable with. We’re always farting around with something where someone can easily take a 25 foot fall, or we’re moving something than can easily get away from us and smash itself, fingers, limbs and bodies to pieces.
Glad we got it done but man, some serious fucking anxiety there for a while. There’s this thing about sons working with their dads, about not wanting to disappoint or fail them, and often doing both. With my dad, it’s like that, except instead of helping them fix a car or plumbing or something, it’s some high wire home maintenance act or tree felling or DIY engineering project. That man has fallen off the roof of his house from various heights at least half a dozen times, and helping him out with this stuff is always a nerve wracking affair. And dirty. And full of spiders and all other manner of creepy crawlies.
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Topic: Things that made you mildly upset today thread (Read 1220280 times)