| Back O' The Page Stories...9/07
By Scott CoverdaleWe have a client who shall be referred to only as "Mrs. E." This woman lived in a mobile home with a large addition, which had doubled the size of her home and quadrupled her problems. It was added on in the Classical Style of the Tucson Pick-'em-up Truck Cowboy School of Architecture. Which means that the thing had a lot of nails in it (3" maze nails to be precise) but also featured over-spanned rafters (2 X 4 @ 24" spanning 12 feet with no pitch) and a ˝" fiberboard roof deck which had long ago stopped pretending to support the rolled roofing. This addition had leaked so profoundly and for so long that this part of the house was basically composting itself. Mrs. E. lost her husband in August to cancer, and her first unilateral decision was to ask CHRPA for assistance to tear off the addition. We usually don't do this type of work, but her situation was pretty daunting, and we decided to go for it. First we had to rebuild the bathroom in her trailer, then we had a demo-fest where the whole company went out for a day and tore down the structure. The City of Tucson donated some 40 cubic-yard waste containers for the project. After that, we had a crew there for the next two weeks installing windows, doors, building a new wall for the laundry, and cleaning up a lot of 3" maze nails. Mrs. E. is not a particularly effusive personality, but she has confessed that she feels like a great weight has been lifted from her shoulders. 120 cubic yards worth, if anybody's counting....
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