Most of the past week was consumed by our decayed sun porch roof. The roof has needed repairs for a long time now, judging from the torrents that poured through during thunderstorms, and we finally found a contractor who agreed to do the job starting Wednesday. It would take one and a half to two days, he reckoned. Instead the crew didn't finish until Saturday.

The problem wasn't so much the roof as the fact that most of the sun porch had to be replaced before the new roof could go on it. It was no surprise that the plywood under the roofing had decayed into what looked like mulch. (I hadn't dared get up there to clean the gutters the past few years) But various headers and posts and floorboards and lots of other pieces I don't know the proper name for were nothing but pulp that you could stick a ballpoint pen into. (Just one of a carpenter's many specialized tools.) Every moldering board that was pulled off revealed another crumbling mess beneath it. In short, our poor sun porch was rotten to the core.

It is now more solid than it ever was. As Mary and I had surmised whoever built it originally had got a lot of things wrong. However it took three days of saws buzzing and hammers banging and nail guns firing and planks thudding. I wonder if it would have been easier to rip the original down and replace it entirely had we known the state it was in.

At least now we will be able to watch the snow pile up on the roof this winter without worrying about whether the roof is going to give way and crash down, pulling the walls in with it.

If only we hadn't had that cold night during all this and discovered our furnace isn't working.