Good fences make good neighbours. And sometimes live ones. Late Sunday night, perhaps at eleven or twelve, I heard something crash outside. →[More:]It wasn’t followed by any more noise, and I was sleepy, so I didn’t investigate. Last night my tenant called me to ask if I knew that half the railing from the rooftop deck of the house next door had fallen off the roof and into our alley. I hadn’t known, and I went to check things out. The remaining part of the railing looked ready to topple any minute. I then called my neighbour Chris to tell him his railing had collapsed the night before. He said, “Is this recent? I just fixed it a few days ago.” I said, “It was last night and the planking is in the alley – I just saw it a minute ago. He said he’d be there in a few minutes. Together we carried the fallen planking through the alley and around his house to his garage. I told him firmly that I wanted him to take down the remaining railing right away as it wasn’t safe at all. He merely gave a kind of non-committal “Uh huh,” in response, but about an hour later he did take it down with the help of a friend of his who’d appeared on the scene.

Chris and his father had built that railing themselves. Chris just sold his house recently and one of the people who came to look at the house told me that railing, nice as it might look, was “nowhere close to being code”. He got that right. It frightens me to think of what could have happened. I spent several hours of my Sunday afternoon, just seven or eight hours before that railing came crashing down, raking and bagging leaves (four bags full), and I passed through that alley numerous times. My tenant was coming and going several times at the same time as well. I even let Trilby out as I occasionally do when I’m going to be outside for awhile and can supervise him, and he frisked about playing in the leaves and exploring down the alley. A good gust of wind could have resulted in any of us being seriously injured or killed.

I think the lesson here is that one really needs to make sure one knows what one is doing before one tackles home reno projects. When I have my rooftop deck built, I'm going to hire it done.