Roofing Nails in the Driveway

Roofing nails and driveways don’t mix. Or they shouldn’t mix. Like oil and water. But sometimes they do, like yesterday for example.

It was mid-afternoon on Tuesday, July 6, a couple of weeks after contractors finished replacing the carriage barn’s rotten and leaky architectural shingles with a beautiful new standing seam roof. I noticed the spiky end of a roofing nail sticking up in the crushed stone driveway directly in front of the barn.

I stooped and quickly recovered more than two dozen more extremely sharp roofing nails scattered where the contractors had parked the dump trailer – sort of a medium sized dumpster with wheels – that was used to collect all of the detritus (asphalt shingles, flashing and roofing nails) they were stripping off of the carriage barn roof.

Roofing Nail Remediation

I crawled around for another 10 minutes or so, visions of punctured tires flashing through my head, retrieving the roofing nails that perfectly match the color of the crushed stone. There were also many small fragments of asphalt shingle embedded in the stone driveway, and while I wish these weren’t there either, the roofing nails are a far greater concern.

Tomorrow we will need to search the entire area with a “shop magnet” to ensure that we’ve removed all the cartoonishly menacing roofing nails. Before a car or tractor tire finds them…

With luck we’ll catch any remaining spikes, but inevitably we’ll drive uneasily for quite a while. Such a simple oversight, and yet such a frustrating inconvenience. This long ago became a familiar pattern, part of the DNA of Rosslyn’s ongoing renovations. One problem solved, another problem (or two) inherited.

Roofing Nails, Renovations and Redaction

Perhaps this is the nature of renovating and revising and redacting. One step forward. One or two back. And the perennial risk of puncture!