Year 2 - Day 50 - February 19

We lost a piece of fascia today during the height of the wind storm.  (Fascia, for those of you who are learning a new vocabulary word like I did today, is the diagonal piece of siding like stuff that goes from the point of the roof diagonally down towards the gutter.  It protects wood, I imagine, since that's what is showing now in that space.)

Being Saturday evening, we had to come up with a solution to last 36 hours until they could come on Monday. 

Problem - 2 pieces flapping in the wind - one about 10 feet long, 1 about 20 feet long. The 10' long one was attached only at the very tip of the roof, and flapping back and forth. BANG. BANG. BANG. (Our neighbors were loving it, I'm sure.)  The other one was attached lower down, but not so low that we could rip it off.  BANG, BANG, BANG.  Into the tree! Onto the siding! Flying free for moments and then slamming back down. It was loud.  Problem was, that there were nails in the flying flap, so we didn't want to get close to it.  Eventually hours later, the nails were gone.  (We need to find them, because they're out there somewhere!)

When on the top of our 6' stepladder (with me standing on the bottom holding him, since the ladder was on a hill and it was still gusting 40mph out there) , Mike could reach the very bottom of the flap. He tried duct taping it down to the house, but the flap was so long that it had serious lift and tape couldn't hold it down.  We decided to try to tape it TO something, and then secure that somehow. 

Enter - the garage door opener.  When we moved in, the garage door opener's motor was bad.  We had it replaced, but the guy didn't take the old one.  Therefore, the motor has been attached to a 10 foot pole and propped up in the garage for months.  It's long.  It has something super heavy on one end. We laughed about the wackiness of the idea, but it worked.

So, the pole with the motor is a few feet out from the house to make a triangle shape, and then the top of the pole is super duct taped to the flying flap.  Now the flap can't get close enough to the house to bang.  I hope it holds for 36 hours....