Fixing a hole...Fixed.

Nothing like johnny-on-the-spotiveness. We've had a hole in our roof since April. Today, we got it fixed. (The photo, hard to parse even for me who took it, is a view from the basement up the space left by the chimney removal through to the roof; that black square at the top center is the blocked hole. The arc-y things are electric wires and flexible plumbing carrying power and water to the second floor.)

We had a party last week; a friend mentioned he knew a contractor he could recommend; the friend actually followed up and introduced us. The contractor, Mike, turns out to be a poet who just published his first book, and is the builder of the Poetry Kiosks that appear around Portland (little windows on stands with poems in them). That alone was enough to get Mike hired, but then we found out he lives less than two blocks away and had been previously recommended by two other friends but they hadn't carried through as thoroughly as this latest friend. Networking and follow-through: the keys to success.

Mike is great. In one day he closed up the hole, re-shingled, and then cut another hole and installed a solar-run heat fan to suck the hot air up and out of the house in the summer. His efficiency is counter-balanced by our lack of it -- for him to get everything done, Andrew and I had to go to Environmental Building Supply (an eco-friendly building supply company, for the solar-powered fan), Home Depot, Lowe's, and Oregon Roofing Supply (for the shingles and plywood).

I took a picture of Mike and Andrew and the fan (which is so efficient that it was spinning while sitting half-out-of-the-box on the workbench on an overcast day), but my camera appears to have broken. The display shows only fine stripes of gray and black, and two out of three photos are unidentifiable files. This happened between Photos #3 and #4 this morning, while the camera sat in my pocket.

Apparently we are going to hire Mike to finish the closet on the second floor (in the hole left by the chimney removal) and possibly to finish the railings on the front steps, since Andrew is more mystified by how to building angled railings than he had let on before. I obviously had better get cracking on getting my camera repaired or replaced!