Recently, I helped my family re-shingle the roof of our home. The roofing contractor’s bid included a three thousand dollar removal charge, but because I have progenitors who never paid someone to do work they could manage themselves, I convinced my husband, that we ought to do that part of the job ourselves. We waited for spring vacation so the kids would be out of school to help us, checked the weather reports (fair and clear all week with temperatures in the 60s and 70s), and borrowed a neighbor’s pickup so we would have a second we could shuttle to the dump with. Then we bought $100-worth of “shingle eaters” (specialized shingle removal tools) and climbed on the roof.
After about an hour of work, we had hardly made a dent, and Garth said, “I think we should have hired some cheap labor and gotten a dumpster.” Maybe he’s just much more practical than I am, but it still seemed to me that hiring someone was merely the lazy way out of the problem. What was this experience really costing us except a little bit of elbow grease? Why were we so averse to rolling up our sleeves and going to work?
Either way, he got discouraged and climbed back down the ladder to go find help. After an hour, he came back with one 14-year-old boy, who turned out to be categorically lazy, not just hesitant to work. Eventually, a few of the more robust teens from the neighborhood joined us. I guess climbing on the roof looked like fun, somehow.
Eventually, my good friend Tina arrived. Tina showed me how I could avoid some unnecessary labor by digging a couple of shrubs out of the flowerbed so we could drive a truck into the backyard and drop shingles directly into the truck bed, rather than dropping them onto a tarp and then hauling the tarp to the truck. Some grunt labor, I learned, is good for the soul, and some labor is just unnecessary. I’m not sure yet how many sprinkler heads I broke driving over them.
We went through a lot of medical tape. I am the only one who doesn’t have blisters, but I didn’t do much shoveling. I spent most of my time pushing “dead” shingles off the roof into the bed of the truck. I do have a hole in my foot from stepping on a nail.
Just as we were wrapping it up for the night, two good-hearted neighbors from next door, who are in the middle of a renovation project of their own, showed up to help. My exhausted children had already called it a day, and Garth was inside nursing wounds he received when he accidentally put his foot through a soft board. I worked alone with the Paynes until my muscles were so spent that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to climb down the ladder. I took a bubble bath and ate a bowl of tomato soup by putting my face as close as I could to the bowl so I didn’t have to move my whole arm and lift the spoon. Tired as I was, I didn’t fall asleep until well after midnight—I would get almost asleep and then I’d startle awake again after seeing visions of someone too close to the edge of the roof.
We drove a total of eight truckloads of shingles to the dump. It takes as long to empty a truck full of shingles as it does to fill one, and you get a whole lot dirtier emptying. At about 1:00 on the second day, it started to blow pretty hard and in the rush to finish before the weather got nasty, one of our young neighbors stepped through a second soft board and poked his foot through the bedroom ceiling directly below him. One of my sons taped a piece of cardboard over the hole from the inside to stop the insulation from blowing into the house. Then, he drove to the hardware store to buy some tarps, since the wind was picking up and the sky was getting dark.
Just as the sky started to get really black, the roofing contractor arrived, surveyed the holes, and offered us his one and only tarp so we could cover up the naked boards before the storm hit. By then, worried neighbors had scavenged together several additional tarps. Next, Drew Payne came over again and helped us nail down tarps. It took us an hour to put another couple hundred nails into the roof we had spent the last two days pulling nails out of. Then we prayed for it not to rain.
It snowed instead. So much for fair and clear.
On day three, we cleaned the last of the nails and shingles out of the flowerbeds and took the final load to the dump. Only then did I start to add up the savings: The cheap labor from those living in our household saved us quite a bit–less pizza for 10 on Monday, and hoagies and Gatorade for another ten on Tuesday; less $100 in tools; less $300 in tarps; less the cost of two new brooms to replace broken push brooms (borrowed) the kids broke pushing shingles off the roof; less about 50 hours of “grunt labor” from kids in the neighborhood at $10 per hour; less one cordless phone (dropped off the roof by mistake); less the repair in the drywall in the bedroom ceiling; less all the hot water it took to get 8 people living in our household clean–twice; less $32 to take 8 truckloads of shingles to the dump; less pending expense of one tetanus shot and new sprinkler heads. So what we got out of this was not the $3,000 savings we were hoping for, but as a result, I have a new appreciation for the value of hard work and what it does for our souls.
Just recently, I read an account of my great-grandfather who owned 200 acres of irrigated farmland. In the summer, he irrigated almost constantly, and never slept in a bed because somewhere, there was always a field that needed water. He would sleep in his car, or beside the ditch bank, or under a shade tree near his fields. On days when he was particularly exhausted, he would lay down in the field at the end of a furrow with his hands outstretched in front of him. When the water reached the end of the field, it would run over his hands and wake him up. That’s the legacy of work I was born under.
I have learned to appreciate a statement made by Boyd K. Packer:
There is great dignity and worth in any honest occupation. Do not use the word menial for any labor that improves the world or the people who live in it. There is no shame in any honorable work.
Clearing shingles off from the roof was not easy, but it was satisfying. As one writer, Ronald O. Barney puts it, “doing something that needs to be done, whether routine or extraordinary, feels good. There is genuine satisfaction in work, especially in work done well and for a good purpose…Work is honorable. It is good therapy for most problems. It is the antidote for worry. It is the equalizer for deficiency of native endowment. Work makes it possible for the average to approach genius. What we may lack in aptitude, we can make up for in performance.”
(Ronald O. Barney, “No Toil nor Labor Fear,” Ensign, Feb 1997, 33).
So, that’s the lesson I purchased for myself trying to save $3,000 dollars. It was a bargain, don’t you think?
