The roofers arrived right on time this morning to begin re-roofing the shop.  This daunting task will cost almost as much as buying the building, but it has to be done.  Without a roof we can trust, well, the building doesn’t matter.

We still have lots more work to do, but I think our next major project will be to finish clearing the overgrowth from behind  the building.  Drainage is a problem, and water seeps through the wall.  We have dirt about a  foot and a half deep across the back of the building to haul out  once we can gain access through the overgrowth, then we plan to brick the ground area and ensure water drains away from the building.

After those two critical tasks, we have three other outside jobs to do on the structure.  We have some reworking to do on some of the glass panels and vents on our beautiful industrial skylights.  We have to rework how the front awning (not original to the building but nice to have) hangs from the building.  We also have significant glass and window casing work on the side and back windows.  We have temporarily hung plastic sheeting over most of the broken panes, and that made a huge difference in stopping wind from blowing into the building.

Inside?  Well, the cleaning continues.  Do you know what really old, water damaged linoleum looks like?

This picture doesn’t do it justice.  It crumbles.  I guess to make showrooms for the furniture, much of the floor was covered in different areas of linoleum.  Age and water damage (that seepage problem I mentioned above) has resulted in a real mess inside.  We’ve been sweeping and breaking up the big pieces and putting them in five gallon buckets.  The linoleum disintegrates into small pieces which will work into the sand at the ranch to enhance our roadbed, so everything has a use.

We were working yesterday to prepare a place inside the back door for the gravel  that comes off the roof (we’ll reuse that, too), and I was putting like things with like things, and I compared it to Sesame Street.  Remember the old song, “One of these things is not like the other?”  We made piles for wood, glass, and linoleum.  We also added more bedrails to the monstrous collection we’ve already gathered.  And, of course, we’ve filled several five gallon buckets with nice, fine dirt.  I guess that’s what you get when you don’t dust a place for thirty years.

One other combination indoor outdoor task we have to do is peek behind the covering put over the upper windows in the front of the building.  If those windows are intact, we plan to take the covering off to expose those windows and bring more light, and, possibly, ventilation, to the building.  We have shades to put over them to repel heat, but we’d like the old-fashioned windows to be visible again — assuming they’re not broken or unrepairable.