Blog: Something Different By: John Heisz
While waiting for the new bearings to come that I ordered for my band saw, I’ve been out of the shop and onto my roof. My house was built in 1978 and, if I’m not mistaken, it has the original shingles. Needless to say, these are in rough shape and the time has come (overdue, actually) to replace them.
The roof is fairly large: about 3500 square feet or about 110 bundles of standard 3 tab shingles, give or take a bundle or two. So, as far as DIY home improvement projects go, this is a big one. I expect it will take me nearly a month to complete, and if this seems like a long time, that is because I’ll be doing the bulk of the work myself. Besides, there’s more to doing a roof than pounding on shingles – there’s flashing, tear-off, deck repairs, etc. All of this takes time, especially if you’re working alone.
The roof is basically two large gable roofs, one higher than the other. They intersect, creating two short valleys. The upper one is smaller but has more obstructions: roof vents, a chimney and skylights. The lower has its own complications where it meets the wall – this needs to be carefully flashed with step flashing and then covered with wall flashing.
My original plan was to do a complete tear-off, but having given it some thought I decided against that. To maintain some protection against sudden cloud bursts while I’m doing it, I thought I would only take off the bad part of the shingle – the tabs and leave the rest. Looking at the roof, I saw that although the tabs were in terrible shape:
the material underneath was in very good shape. This would be a reasonable compromise – giving me the protection I wanted while getting rid of the worst of the old roof. Shown here, some of the new and some of the old with the tabs removed:
I cut the tabs from four rows at a time, shingle that and move on. At the end of the day, all I need to do to completely waterproof the roof is slide new shingles temporarily under the old ones above.
A lot of work to flash at the wall and repair the roof where they meet – this area was pretty much wide open before (that’s actually how it was built) and I would get the occasional squirrel in my attic. Now,it’s completely closed and properly flashed.
So far, this way of stripping has worked very well and the new roof looks very good indeed.
Cutting the tabs off is easy and once off, I can see if there are any popped nails to deal with. Another advantage is that I’m reducing my disposal cost by more than half, since only about 45% of the old shingle is being removed.
Progress at the end of today:
This represents less than 1/3 of the total roof area. Still more to do, including new siding under the eave (centre of picture, brown area). I’ve closed the valley by weaving the shingles over it. I like this better than the open valley and feel it’s more watertight.
The skylights were put in 2 years ago and the roof redone around them. The new shingles will go right over these newer ones – I don’t want to disturb the flashing on those; it took long enough to get those to stop leaking when I first installed them, I don’t want to risk it.