I raked the snow.
Do you live in Alaska?? If you do then you know March is quite possibly the hardest month. Yes, we have more daylight, dog mushing events, snow machining, extended skiing hours, and ALL THE NORTHERN LIGHTS. It can be incredible in March. It can also be miserable.
I know people are going to argue with me on this next statement but if they do they just haven’t lived here long enough and they should know the LAST 10 -15 years have been haywire. We had 50-degree days in march, I PAINTED in Mid-March one year it was SO WARM.
This is where they’re going to argue with me, TYPICALLY in March we still have a LOT OF SNOW and breakup isn’t even on its way. We may have had a couple of warm days but we still have a month of snow and then 6 weeks of breakup before it’s nice out. We LIVE for it but we also WAIT for it.
And this is year is a doozy. Where everyone else is like yeah spring here we go. We’re all like “hey did you hear ANOTHER building collapsed under the snow load??” Our public library roof collapsed in February. That was a terrible loss for our community. A roof collapsed at a gym in Anchorage and someone was killed. Absolutely tragic.
Last weekend several more places collapsed. My husband and I looked at each and at the part of our roof that’s not at a steep angle and realized we might waiting on a disaster. So we bought a snow rake.
We began clearing the roof as much as we could. A few weeks ago we used a floor jack to remove the ice dam as much as possible. File that one under “Dumb Ways To Die.” We figured that every piece we broke off would help lighten the snow load. And whatever we raked off would ALSO help.
When your house is almost 100 years old and you WANT it to get to be 100 years old you have to take care of it.
So I raked snow. He raked snow. And we got as much as possible off the roof of our mudroom. We did what we can do now. This summer we’re planning to install heat tape so when and if ice builds up we can work on it under the ice AND on top of it.
If you’ve got warm spring weather I hope you’re enjoying it! We’ll get there eventually.