Rad Roofing Reno (Volume 2 of 2)

The roof! BAM, there it is. If you shield your eyes from seeing the mess we made in the yard (dumpster comin’ soon), the peeling paint, and some of that rotting siding (shield hard), it might actually look like a nice little outbuilding on our property. (If you missed Volume 1, start here.)

It’s come a long way in 10 days, and the fact that Pete was able to do it for us himself is totally awesome to me. His Dad deserves props too–having someone on the ground to constantly relocate the air compressor hose and toss up a pry bar in a pinch is terribly underrated–and if I can recommend anything to you in terms of how to replace a roof yourself, it’d be to get a buddy to help you out, one who’s cool to stay on the ground to lend a hand and get you donuts. I know I keep bringing up the donuts, but really, they’re as essential to DIY roofers as they are to cops.

The new roof is a pretty sight (and a pretty gratifying one at that), especially from within with all that shiny new plywood sheathing. There’s never been prettier plywood sheathing, am I right? (I’m shielding you from the rotting floor.)

He’s shingled before, but never with architectural shingles which (who knew, not me) are a bit different both in form and technique of installation than traditional 3-tabbers, so even though he had a plan of attack, Pete still began at the back of the barn to get the hang of how the courses were installed and staggered.

In addition to skimping on shingle quality (I say skimping because we did save $180 by getting most of our shingles from Bargain Outlet and maybe a real roofer reading this is rolling their eyes and calling us buffoons), we also made the decision to save on shingles used for the hips and ridge by buying traditional 3-tab shingles and cutting them down to size individually. They sell shingles specifically for the hip and ridge cap right at the store, but they’re twice as expensive and who knows if the sq. ft. coverage is comparable to what we bought in 3-tab packs (which was only two packages, $50). Pete did all of this cutting on Wednesday night, in the hours between 12-2am just to get ahead and be able to finish the whole job on Thursday. I have no photos to prove this, I slept soundly. Dude’s got work ethic.

I should probably mention that doing a roof on a one-story building isn’t nearly as intimidating as on a 2+ story building for obvious reasons, and while the scene from the front isn’t all that scary, the backside is built on a steep hill which basically drops off into a ravine about 4 stories below. Fun times?

By the time he worked his way around to the front where I could see his progress on the second day of laying the shingles, he had found a rhythm and was almost done.

It’s pretty obvious that we still have a lot of work ahead of us; rebuilding the roof was just part of it, we still have to work on adding fascia and soffiting to keep animals out. Also, the siding is a mess, the interior flooring has to be relaid from where it was effected by water damage, the garage door is dirty and rotting, and there was some mention of a joist that’s rotted out which means nothing’s holding up one of our walls. So… that’s not all on our list for this fall, but you may be reading about the developments for the next few years. For now, I’m happy to have a covered roof to store our adirondack chairs and lawnmowers during the winter.

Can you get a sense of what it looked like before? (Even before we cleared a lot of the brush away from the front?) The remaining shingles were brittle and basically melting off.

And now?