Also unfortunately, we appear to have misunderstood the instructions on the roof goop. Instead of setting a layer of the stuff, then letting it dry, then applying the cloth cover, it says that you're supposed to put the cloth over the wet goop. There's no practical way to actually do that on that roof; it would require Lisa to stand in the goop while tacking down the roofing cloth. So instead she laid down some of the cloth and will apply extra goop on top of it. The cloth is actually semi-permeable because it's suppose to absorb the roof goop anyway.
Also, the last sheet she laid down wasn't quite long enough to reach the roof edge. There's about a 1 x 2 meter area at the bottom for which she'll need to set another sheet. Naturally, the gap is in one of the areas of the roof that is most difficult to reach. On the bright side, once this is in place, we'll have the forward third completely covered, and maybe we'll have managed to cover the holes that caused the most difficulty last winter. Then we can start working our way toward the back of the house, where there are fewer holes and the roof is in slightly better shape.
(Only slightly, however. While Lisa was using the leaf blower to clear moss, a meter-long sheath of shingles blew right off the roof.)
I've not been completely idle in my ground-spotter role. When possible, I've been doing trimming of the brush and trees around the bottom of the house. We need to trim that stuff back anyway, for various reasons, including the fact that without the trimming, it's very difficult to retrieve things that fall off the roof during the work. And it's nearly impossible to avoid dropping things while you're up there. I reckon that one the reasons the professional roofers would have charged so much is that they would have wanted to build a scaffold to provide some flat spaces from which they could work.
