Do It Yourself - Raising One Hell of a Roof

Nov 6

Written By Rivka

We've always been a do-it-yourself kind of family. No, I didn't homeschool my kids. I was happy for them to get out of the house and learn Italian and .... I didn't want replicas of me. God knows I'm not perfect. We were so isolated on the farm it would've been just me and them, nope not for us.

But everything else, yip we did it ourselves... growing food, killing chickens, making wine ... building a house, building another house, you get the picture.

So, last summer we needed to fix up the roof on the barn. Here it is in pictures. Cautionary note: do not try this at home. Put this playlist on loud so you can get in the groove of what it was like. Every day, we woke up, had some breakfast, and got out into the boiling sun to wrestle with beams. Enjoy!

A day in the life... mama is cooking lunch and the guys are grooving to Led Zeppelin and moving homemade scaffolding around. Yeh! We took down the old roof, created steel-reinforced concrete supports, put up support beams, structural beams, panels, ceiling ... all on a stone structure from a couple of hundred years ago, that was CROOKED!

The Roof:

The Materials:

and a lot of sand, cement, bricks, and pasta!

The Players:

Two lanky but energetic teenagers, a power-lifter Classics student, the Boss, and me, yours truly, 62 years old former midwife, cafe owner, and long distance runner.