Following a storm a couple of months ago, we discovered that a shutter had been blown off the front of the house and into the front yard. Several weeks later we picked up the shutter bolts and Lowe’s and after many subsequent Saturday mornings of my asking if we were going to hang the downed shutter, we finally got to it this past weekend.
It’s not that hanging a shutter is such a difficult task. We’ve had to rehang a couple of them on the lower windows. The challenge in this particular case was the fact that this shutter required getting onto the porch roof. Although Dave is not afraid of heights per ce, he is not too keen on climbing a ladder and then transferring to the roof. A while ago I suggested he climb out a bedroom window onto the roof. That seemed so much easier than taking out the extension ladder and wrestling it into place so the task was moved up the queue. We gathered our tools and headed upstairs to the guest room.
Our window are tilt-out thermopane but not exactly like those we’ve had before. These windows apparently don’t come out of their frames like those we’re accustomed to and the screens seemingly wouldn’t come out unless the window did. We jiggled and wiggled our window and screen for about twenty minutes before admitting defeat. Down to the garage we went with the shutter and our tools to get out the extension ladder.
After wrestling the ladder into place, Dave cautiously climbed to the roof with his bag of tools in hand. He tossed the bag onto the roof and surveyed his approach.
“I don’t think I can get there from here.” he said.
“Should we try to extend the ladder more?” I asked.
“OK”
So we wrestled the ladder down again, extended it to its maximum height and propped it up against the house. Again he climbed to the top. Still not satisfied, he came back down and began to walk around to the front of the house in search of a better angle of approach.
Meanwhile, the fact we couldn’t get the screen out of the upstairs window out was still gnawing at me so I went back upstairs to revisit the problem. Dave came to join me and finally, after a few anxious moments, we discovered that the screen could be easily removed from the top if the window was just tilted out a bit. Hooray!
With the screen out, Dave could easily climb out and attach the shutter – except for the fact that the bag of tools was still sitting on the far end of the porch roof from his first trip up the ladder. So, after climbing the ladder one last time, Dave retrieved the tool bag and returned to complete the task. After a couple of minutes, the shutter was rehung, the screen replaced and our job complete except for having to return to the driveway and wrestle the extension ladder back to the ground and compact it for storage.
The total time of the job was about ninety minutes – most of which involved figuring out how to remove the screen and wrestling with the ladder.
Later that afternoon, we were chatting with our neighbors over the fence.
“We finally got that shutter up”. I said.
“It was easy, just climbed out onto the roof from the window.” Dave said.
“How did you get the screen off?” they asked, “We tried for a long time last week when I was power washing the house but never could figure it out.”