Let’s raise the roof!

Although it cannot be seen from street level, the two rows of houses in this street each share a gable roof in addition to all the hooks in the facade. When the residents found out that the street was built in 1880, they also realized that the roof tiles had been there for over a century. High time for a replacement!

Since the Wolmaransstraat is a private road, this renovation had to be arranged by the residents themselves. Many men in the street were construction workers, and they knew the Montgomerystraat in the south-west of Leiden was being renovated. Those houses were less than 30 years old, which meant that the roof tiles they would take from there were good for another 40 years.

Every day, a group of men traveled to the south-west of Leiden to pick up the discarded roof tiles. Two houses at a time, the roofs were rid of their old tiles. After this, a tarpaulin was stretched over the wooden framework, and the 'new' roof tiles were laid. This obviously had to happen outside of normal working hours, so everyone's help was needed to make this plan a reality. The whole street joined forces: scaffolding was borrowed from the bosses of the men who worked in construction; the men climbed onto the roof to lay the tiles and a number of women took turns cooking for everyone who was working on the roofs.

To make it all a bit more bearable, a lot of beer was knocked back. The evenings were filled with both work and play. After weeks of hard work, the last roof tile was laid. The residents of the Wolmarans were sure to put the flag out that evening!