So it’s still mid-Spring 2018. After getting our supplies from Miami, it was time to get serious about drying in. First was the roof. Initially being from Texas my first choice was a metal roof. Luckily Rolando talked me out of that, saving us not only quite a bit of dough but also a lot of repairs later. Wandering around St Thomas and Water Island after the hurricanes it was clear that metal roofs are a bad idea here. More than half of them couldn’t take the wind and ended up totally shredded or with major damage. You can’t put enough screws in them to hold them on. On the other hand, we noticed that very few roofs that were finished with Topcoat had any damage at all. The Topcoat method goes like this. You put the roof decking up like normal, but the next step is to tape the joints with Topcoat flashing compound. This is a fairly thick liquid rubber membrane product. The tape is simply a lightweight Dacron cloth. After the joints are done you roll on three or more thick coats of the regular Topcoat product. And that’s it! Every 5 years or so you put a new coat on. Much cheaper and easier than metal, tile, or shingles. I think the reason it works in the Islands is that there really is no hail, and the temperature doesn’t change much. So while we were gone our buddy Cliff did the taping and one coat of Topcoat.
Over the next 3 weeks when it wasn’t raining I put another two coats on, and started on our gutter system. Again on Rolando’s advice we decided to go with internal gutters versus external ones. External gutters tend to blow away a lot in hurricanes. The internal gutter is simply edging the roof with pressure treated 1X6 boards, then putting some drains in to collect the water. We also started putting the concrete board on the exterior walls. Since our deck wasn’t getting built anytime soon I decided to use a Pump Jack scaffold system. I did have a set in Texas, but it turned out to be cheaper to just buy a new set on Amazon and ship them out. You make two long poles out of 2x4s, attach them to the facade of the roof, and the whole thing rides up and down these poles. It’s quite a bit easier than building a fixed scaffold. It can also get a lot more exciting than a fixed scaffold when things go wrong! It’s also nice in that you can adjust the height so that everything is always at an easy working level. To go up you operate the foot levers one side at a time, to go down you operate the hand cranks and gravity does the rest.
Before putting the concrete board on the walls we put lead and PVC flashing at the base of the walls to keep water from coming inside the house. The newest version of the DuroRock boards turned out to be quite a bit lighter than the previous ones I had worked with before. So in most cases I was able to put them into position myself, leaving Buttercup safely on the ground. I fastened them to the plywood with a lot of concrete backer screws, then caulked the joints with silicone caulk and taped the joints with fiberglass mesh and Total Wall Base Compound.
One thing we discovered working with the Base Compound was that since we have so much wind at our house it dries very quickly and becomes unworkable. It was impossible to work with in the Sun, so we had to time our work schedule so that whichever wall we were working on was in the shade. The next week or so was spent getting the rest of the flashing and concrete board up on all the walls.
We were starting to run out of vacation time so the last task before leaving was to put one of our rollup hurricane doors in place. You always learn on the first one, it took us most of a day to figure out how to put it up.
Soon we were getting on the plane for another 2 months of working at our day jobs. This was Day 50 of construction.