I had a pleasant conversation with a friend of mine yesterday at his step-granddaughter's birthday party. We began talking about housing sales and such and I started telling him some horror stories of a property I was familiar with. One such story was about a time in his life he lived in Alexander County, IL. This is at the far southern tip of Illinois and is very, very rural. His business of home repair and building new homes found a severe lacking of dependable people in that part of the state.
One of his stories was about a deaf home owner. He said he had to rig a loud ringing bell so she could know the phone was ringing. The loud bell would vibrate her chair enough for her to know the phone was ringing. When I was telling my wife this story my wife asks "If she's that deaf how can she talk on the phone?" I admit that didn't occur to me at the time. I guess she's not completely deaf as she did call him on the phone and ask for help.
Anyway, this lady had felt her bed move one night while sleeping. She thought it was an earthquake at first - we live in the New Madrid earthquake zone. So he didn't quite understand what had made her bed move and why she wanted him to look at the roof so he went to take a look anyway. When he got there he discovered she had a new roof put on a few months earlier. For some reason the drip edge was much larger than normal. Normally, it's about an inch and a quarter but this one was 3 or 4 inches. So he peeled back the roof and discovered it had new decking OVER several layers of an older roof. On top of the decking was another layer of new shingles. This explained why the drip edge was so big. It was covering up someone's laziness to remove the old roof shingles. He was aghast that someone would do such a thing!
After he found this gross error in judgment on the roof, he went inside the attic. There he found 3 broken trusses. The weight of the roof was breaking the trusses. The fall of the trusses had landed on the ceiling joists above her bedroom.
He told her what had been done and she needed to get that fixed ASAP. She still had her receipt. I think he said they were paid to tear off the old roof as well. He told her to call the contractor and demand this be fixed correctly but she didn't want to call them back for some reason. She paid him to tear it all off and do the roof properly.
One of the funny things to the story was he said normally you need roofing nails about an inch and a half long for roofing shingles. But these guys must have used nails 5 inches long to get through all the layers and new sheets of plywood to make it stay.
He said when he left that area he had a waiting list a year and a half long and two other contractors told him they were glad he was leaving. :-)
This is an unbelievable story. I am glad she got it fixed.
As for deaf people using the phone. They have a service which allows the deaf user to type their portion of a 'conversation' and the TDY operator will speak their portion of the conversation to the caller. Then they type the other persons reply to the deaf user can read it. Its a wonderful service. However it requires special equipment on the deaf users end. Callers don't need anything but a phone.
Betina
It's sad to hear that contractors operate like that. What happened to an honest days work for an honest days pay? That makes me angry, and it's sad that all the other contractors were happy when you left. God forbid you should hold them to a standard of doing their jobs well, I'm sure they'll be happy to get back to business as usual and screw over a couple elderly or disabled people.
Those stories always remind me of the old aluminum siding salesmen, who would prey on the elderly and move on to another town - once discovered. Sad but true. Steve
Bill,
This was a terrible problem here in Florida in 2004. So many people sustained so much roof damage from the TRIPLE THREAT (that's what we call the 3 major hurricanes that we got that year). Their roof shingles were simply nailed onto old rotten shingles. One of the roofers informed me that this is a common practice. It saves so much time. And they don't have to remove the old shingles. He said what's really scary is the roof damage you end up finding when you DO remove the old shingles (like the rotten trusses and or plywood boards). I say "Do it right the first time!"