Almost Done

There is only one difficult part about shingling and that is doing the corners. Each shingle must be trimmed to fit, and they must go on in s a special order so they shed water properly. Just my luck, the only thing I’m doing are corner shingles.

The number of shingles I put on would have taken maybe a half hour if they had been in the field, but on the corner I spent about 3 hours on them. Admittedly, I’m not the fastest shingler, but in my defense, I was working on a ladder. With scaffolding this would have gone faster.



As you can see I was able to complete about 80% of it today. It gets increasingly more difficult and time consuming the higher I get. Tomorrow I should be able to finish in about an hour or so. You would think it was just a matter of removing a few old shingles and nailing up some new ones. No such luck. The big problem is the old nails.

You need to remove old nails that are up under shingles that you want to keep, and wouldn’t you know it, they make a special tool for this. It’s called a Shingle Ripper. Fortunately I own one. It looks kind of like a Slim-Jim one would use to break in to cars. You slide it up under a shingle and catch a nail with a hook on the end. There is a flat bar at the other end of the ripper that you bang on with a hammer and it pulls the nail out from under the shingle. It’s not an exact science and getting some nails can take a few tries. Nothings easy.