Sunday, September 1, 2013

Fiddling On The Roof

What have I been up to?  Well..... besides no good, not much except getting ready to rip apart the house and start over again.  It started off innocently enough.  We needed a new roof.  The old one was shot!  Last winter we started to get shingles blowing off in the storms.  Not good.  So my husband had a few weeks off and we decided to spend it putting on a new roof.


We had to strip off the old shingles because, A-nothing is ever easy and B-we had 3 layers on the roof already.  We did find, what we thought at the time, was a nice surprise though.


The original roof which is cedar shake.  It would be really cool if we could find a product to coat the shake with to make it weather tight.

Rustoleum has introduced a new product called Deck Restore.  It's a thick paint made for decks and concrete.  It was great for filling in the gaps and nail holes in the shake.  Just what we were looking for.  Bad news is it made the shake look like flat pieces of plywood on the roof.  We would have had to put shadows and highlights to get the look of the cedar shake back, so we ended up scrapping that idea.


We took off the black shingles and the green shingles and the even uglier green shingles under them and replaced with a dark brown.  It made such a huge change on the house too.

It also sparked the project bug in my hubby and led to another project that needed to be done BADLY!

Any guesses what that could be?

4 comments:

  1. Hi Maggie,
    We have just had a new roof as well ...... you could see daylight through it !!! We also had a lot of repointing done and the house painted.
    Good to see you back and I hope that you and your lovely family are well.
    XXXX

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  2. This is a big roofing project and your husband might need help to be able to finish it right on time. What made dark shingles a good choice is that it conceals dirt and algae better, but this shouldn't be a reason to avoid cleaning your roof regularly. Also, many owners prefer dark color when roof is sloped and visible from the ground.

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  3. Too bad about the original cedar shingles. But for the long run, it was a good decision to just replace the whole thing with new shingles, as you’ll end up replacing those cedar ones in a few years. They've been there for quite some time now. So what are you renovating now, a room maybe? Have fun with it!

    Allyson

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  4. While it would've been cheaper to just replace the broken ones, it was better that you went with the whole thing. At least now you don't have to go up the roof to check if the other shingles are already too old and worn out every few months. And you got to choose a new material as well as a uniform color for all of it. I'd say that's a good enough reason for doing what you did.

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