Homely Renovations R Us

Now that Study Boy has emerged from writing the first draft of his research proposal, we spent some time doing house reno stuff yesterday. The never ending process of putting the actual house back together was temporarily suspended though because regular maintenance was required on the garage. It is disheartening to spend money and time on such an ugly building. We have future plans to tear the existing garage down and build a new one because it is:
1 ugly
2 in the view
3 falling down anyway
4 badly designed for our needs

But until we build a new one that corrects all these faults, we still need a place to store tools, motorcycles, kilns and building materials. Oh, and the car in winter. The roof has leaked for a while, and we tried to ignore it but it started leaking on things like the table saw and the chop saw and it really wasn't going to survive another winter. We thought that maybe we would just cover it in a tarp, but realistically, this building will be standing for at least another 3 years, but probably more like 5 or 6. Sigh.
So Study Boy morphed into Good Ol' Boy and visited the local hardware store to see if he could strike a deal on some cheap, roofing shingles. The staff at the local Timbermart know us by name, so when we appear and ask if they have any open or leftover bits and pieces they want to get rid of, they are usually pretty happy to sell it to us at a good price just to get rid of it.
Compared to the shingles we put on the house a couple of years ago, these are really thin and seem to lose a lot of asphalt while you are handling them. They are meant to be 15 year shingles, but they won't last 10. Fine for a building that (hopefully) will be gone in half that time.
With all the money he saved on shingles, Tool Boy bought a roofing gun on Ebay. When we shingled the house roof, we borrowed one from a neighbour who has since moved away, so we justified the expense by saying that we have friends that need roofing projects done this fall. What goes around, comes around.