Homeowners’ Associations (HOAs); we love them, we hate them. We love them when it prevents our neighbors from doing something stupid that impacts me. We hate them when they prevent me from doing something I want to do, it is my house after all and why should they care. Love them or hate them, when we buy into those neighborhoods we commit to living within the HOA restrictions. So what does this have to do with your replacement roof? Believe it or not, most HOAs will have restrictions based on what roofing materials you can use. Here in the Kansas City area, historically many HOAs required Cedar Roofs. And Cedar Roofs look great!!! Granted that is when new, but Cedar Roofs are also expensive, labor intensive, maintenance intensive, fire risk (and associated insurance cost), and they harbor insects and creepy-crawly critters. Thankfully, mostly due to fire risk and influence from insurance companies, most of these Cedar Roof HOA restrictions have been removed. However this doesn’t mean you can install the cheapest 3-tab shingle either. For example, I recently prepared a bid to replace a Cedar Roof. The homeowner asked for “Timberline” shingles. While “Timberline” is specified in many HOA restrictions, Timberline is actually a trade name for GAF; what HOAs are requiring are called “Architectural Grade” shingles (I just put a Band-Aid on my finger, Timberline is a trade name that has become a generic term). Within “Architectural Grade” there are several grades. I know that some of the roofing contractors prepared a bid based on the Base 30-year Architectural Shingles; however my experience in this neighborhood is that the HOA restrictions do not allow for a 30-year Architectural Roof, they actually require a thicker roof. Depending on the manufacturer, they may rate Architectural Grade shingles such as 30-40-50, or they may put some terms such as 30-plus-premium or 30-plus-lifetime. Anyway, I knew that this particular HOA required 50-year Architectural Shingles (premium, lifetime, 50, depending on how the manufacturer names them) and adjusted my bid price accordingly (a 50-year Architectural Grade shingle isn’t going to be as cheap as a base 30-year Architectural Grade Shingle). While other roofing contractors bid the job (for a fair bit less) based on materials not allowed by the Homeowners’ Association. Thankfully I had an opportunity to educate the homeowner before he made a decision he would come to regret, as putting unapproved roofing materials on your house would have likely been met with some punitive actions by the Homeowners Association.
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Here in Jackson County and surrounding areas, we were enjoying unseasonably warm temperatures and fantastic weather, but now that the cold weather is here, it is important to do some preventative maintenance on your roof to prepare it to withstand winter. According to El Nino, we are likely to be warmer than normal, but also more moisture, so having your roof in tip-top shape is important. Where do you start? First, make sure your gutters are clean and drain well. Most of the leaves are off the trees, and if you have trees overhang your roof they are also in your gutters. It is critical that any water on your roof have a clear drainage path, and having gutters clean is critical to this drainage path. This drainage path will also help alleviate ice dams, depending on how cold we may get. While you are cleaning your gutters, check for missing or damaged shingles. You can typically see missing shingles from the ground level, but there are areas of your roof that you can only properly observe from a higher vantage point. If you have any trees that overhang the roof, the branches can contact the roof and this will cause damage to shingles. Also any twigs or fallen or broken branches on your roof can potentially cause damage. These branches should be trimmed, and any damaged roof shingles replaced. Shingles have glue strips, and the unseasonably warm temperatures we are having will ensure your glue strips activate prior to winter’s cold. And last, check your flashings. Especially plumbing and vent stacks, as these flashings have a rubber seal to ensure the seal to the roof penetration is tight. This rubber breaks down with ultraviolet (sun) exposure. When the rubber breaks down, this will result in a roof leak. If you don’t want to climb onto your roof, you can call a professional roofing contractor to provide this service as well. One of the biggest luxuries DIY-motivated homeowners have is time. You have a day job, your DIY home improvements are your hobby. This is something you enjoy after work, on weekends, during your free time. Your home improvements are something you take great pride in doing, doing well, and showing off to others. But let’s think about this for a minute. How many of these projects have a critical time component associated with them? You have a great bar in your basement, what are the consequences if you got sick in the middle of the job and didn’t finish it on time? What about your fantastic man cave – you know who you are? Or remodeling that guest bedroom? If these took a couple of weeks extra, was it really that big of a deal in the scheme of things? Your roof – you don’t have that luxury. Once you start your roofing project, you need to get it finished. Even if you fall into the thought process that roofing underlayment provides you weather protection until you get shingles installed, let me assure you that this weather protection has a maintenance price. Every rain you will be inspecting your underlayment. Moderate winds will render it useless and any wind-driven rain will result in roof leaks. Roof leaks result in more sheetrock repairs, which as a DIY-capable homeowner you have already proven that sheetrock is a project that you have no fear of. This is one of the greatest factors if you consider a roof a DIY job. When professional roofing contractors start your job, it is going to be finished quickly. And it isn’t just nailing those asphalt shingles up to finish the job; those shingles have a glue strip that needs to set before your roof is truly weather tight. Once you start a roofing project, you want to make sure it gets done and the shingles properly glued => before the next rain. This is one of the great advantages professionals bring. We work with our tools every day, so we invest in quality tools and they pay us back. Of course this is one of the greatest advantages of DIY jobs too; with the money you save you want more tools. This is a universal of DIY-motivated homeowners => tools are good and more tools are better!!! But it isn’t just the tools. You need to understand how to use those tools to get the most out of them. Every time you put a new tool in your hand, there is a learning curve. A hammer, a Roofing Utility Knife, and a Hack Saw will get you a long way. You could hammer every nail, and old timers certainly did it this way before pneumatic tools, but then there is skill to hammering nails as well (keep them straight, don’t smack your thumb, don’t underdrive the nails, and don’t damage the shingles). Back to some basic math though, a typical roof is 30-squares, each square is 3-bundles, each bundle is 20-shingles, and each shingle takes 4-6 nails (this depends on roof slope and prevailing wind considerations) – this is right around 10,000 nails. Have fun with that. Again though, DIY jobs are about opportunity to buy a new tool. For a job you are going to do once, you are probably shopping at the discount tool supplier. Let me caution you to NOT do this; good tools are worth the investment. If you are going to nail 10,000 nails, you will appreciate the difference by the end of the job. Sure, you need a pneumatic coil nailer. Now you need an air compressor too. Are you going to be doing this by yourself, because if you have friends helping you (and those are GOOD friends), you need more nailers and you need a bigger air compressor. But it isn’t just the tools either. If you set the pressure to your air compressor too low, you will be finish hammering every nail in. If you set the pressure to your air compressor too high, you will damage shingles and have to replace them. If you don’t hold that nailer perpendicular to the roof, you won’t drive nails straight and this again damages shingles. Sure, this isn’t brain surgery, but it isn’t something you pick up and use perfectly the first time either. And this is simply a single tool you need. Professional roofing contractors bring many other tools to the job, all professional grade, and more importantly we aren’t learning to use new tools on your roofing job. Alright, if the story in the last blog post in this series didn’t deter your from DIY, at least you have learned to avoid a pitfall. You aren’t going to fall into that trap and focusing solely on lowest delivered price. You are certainly not going to shop at DIY-friendly big box stores, but you know you need to research where the professional roofing contractors shop and ordering your materials appropriately. You might pay a little bit more, you might pay a little bit less, but delivery to your roof => when you aren’t carrying it up the ladder this is priceless. Next up, roofing looks pretty simple. And if you got the Taunton Press Books I recommended, you have a Standard Operating Procedure of sorts. And these are widely considered some of the best source materials for DIY, so it isn’t me trying to mislead you. However let me ask you a couple of questions about your profession. I will first assume you are an expert in your field. If I ask you, and five (5) other experts in your field the same question, am I likely to get the same answer? I have a friend who is a Civil Engineer, and he tells me that if you ask five (5) Civil Engineers the same question you are likely to get ten (10) different answers. He will also tell you engineers are pretty dysfunctional like that though. My point is, you read that Taunton Press Book that was the compilation from Fine Homebuilding Magazine. The authors are all experts in their field, these articles are edited for quality, accuracy, and value to the readers of Fine Homebuilding. And yet in that book, there are at least four (4) ways delineated as “best method” to flash a valley. All published at different times, and all published from different geographic areas. So what is different? Different experiences, perhaps due to different timing of learning or due to geographic considerations? If you are a DIY-capable homeowner, you wouldn’t be expected to be an expert in the field. You are researching to save money, get better quality, pride in your work, or maybe a bit of all three (3). What you don’t have are lessons from experience. For the record, in my service area (southern Jackson County Missouri) you will find that most roofing professional contractors use an open-valley technique with factory paint finished aluminum flashing. Thicker is better (up to a point), but aluminum is soft, easy to form, and holds its shape so is a DIY-friendly material. Make sure you lap it correctly, and use high quality caulk where necessary. There are exceptions though, and these exceptions are based on specific roofs. And if we can’t agree on even basic roof valleys, just imagine how our disagreements escalate when talking about more complex roofing details. A roof is your first line of defense for your most valuable asset. What are the ramifications of not understanding the different potential solutions to a common roof detail such as a valley? Roof leaks? This isn’t the same as mixing your joint compound too thick and having to spend extra time sanding your new sheetrock wall in your man cave, or having to use an extra coat of paint to get good paint coverage. The consequences here are much greater than time or labor. Roofing is heavy material, and the amount of lifting should not be discounted. Even a basic 20-year 3-tab shingle weighs 225-lbs/square (a square is 100 square feet of roof). A typical roof in my Kansas City roofing service area in Kansas City is 25-30 squares. For 3-tab shingles, it takes 3 bundles/square, so each bundle is just shy of 80-lbs. Most of my customers opt for architectural shingles, and these weigh more but you should always just plan on approximately 100-lbs/bundle. If you like designer series asphalt roofing, we can easily exceed 450-lbs/square. Let’s do some quick math; assuming a 30-square roof, you are easily moving 7,000-lbs. to 14,000-lbs. of just roofing shingles. This doesn’t account for underlayment (60 lbs./roll for 30-lb. felt). Rather than expound on the amount of labor is here, I am going to tell an amusing story about one of my neighbors (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent). A very accomplished DIY person who was convinced that roofing was within his skillset (a good assumption). As a good DIY researcher, he researched options, made decision, and then went shopping for the cheapest delivered price. His roof was a bit larger than typical, roughly 35-squares. When this was delivered, his roofing materials was unloaded on a pallet and the pallet placed just in front of his garage door, which happened to be the center of a two-car garage opening. Please note that this was roughly 105-bundles of roof shingles, I will leave the rest of the materials out of the weight calculations. This was over 9,000-lbs of asphalt shingles. So how did that roofing get from his driveway to the roof? Over his shoulder, up a ladder, one bundle at a time. Each bundle weighed 90-lbs. He was up and down that ladder 105 times just to get asphalt shingles from where the store delivered them to a place he could use them. All because he did his research and saved money be using the lowest delivered price. How much was his time worth? How much time did he have invested before he even opened a shingle pack and started nailing? And once on the roof, he still had to distribute the packs to where he was installing them, so it wasn’t simply up and down the ladder carrying 90-lbs every time. On the other hand, professional roofers pay extra for rooftop delivery. Rooftop delivery takes special equipment, and these roofing suppliers generally serve professionals only. My roofing supplier will sell to DIYs, but it is up to the DIY to find the suppliers that cater to professionals, and not DIYs. And the cost for this service, to professionals that do repeat business? Sure I can order ground-drop delivery, but rooftop delivery is generally only $10-20 dollars more, although I do have to accommodate their schedule as not every truck is equipped for this. This is certainly a pitfall of DIY roofing that isn’t explained in any books. As a Lees Summit roofing contractor, I field a lot of questions about DIY considerations from homeowners looking to save money. Most of these homeowners are quite capable at home repairs but have proven that while they may lack experience, they have several other home maintenance or home improvement items that have worked out well for them. They have a nicer place to live, and they saved some money on the projects by performing their own labor. I appreciate the appeal of saving some money and have certainly finished projects at my house rather than call a professional. This isn’t to discourage DIY-savvy homeowners, but it just might provide some additional considerations. Just about any DIY project, my recommendation as the first place to start is your local library. The problem is that books only get you so far, and this is AFTER you figure out which books are relevant and which books are fluff. And while I will grant you that Internet research if both faster and easier, there are simply too many perils for this to be your starting point as you have limited ways to validate the credibility of the source. With a published book, you can validate the credibility of the source. I would recommend books from “Taunton Press”; there are a couple on Flashing and Waterproofing in the Taunton Press “For Pros By Pros” series, as well as a book asphalt shingles (get beyond asphalt, and DIY is simply too perilous), and a book on roofing that is a collection of articles in “Fine Homebuilding” magazine. This blog topic isn’t a replacement for library and Internet research (I said Internet research wasn’t best, but we all know this is your first stop). This topic will supplement some considerations you won’t readily find in the books. Most books are aimed at educating the consumer so they can hire a good contractor, or aimed at professionals to speed up production, and some considerations don’t fit easily into either audience. A couple that I am going to discuss are: 1) Don’t underestimate the amount of heavy lifting and labor that goes into a roof. 2) Don’t underestimate how much experience goes into doing this correctly and consequences it not done correctly. 3) Professionals bring tools you may not have. 4) How much time do you have to invest? 5) Warranty work, what happens if something fails? Among roofing contractors, there is a lot of debate about the purpose of underlayment and what type you should use. Some roofing contractors will tell you that underlayment’s only purpose is to “dry-in” the structure before the roof shingles are installed and that once the roof shingles are installed that the underlayment serves no purpose as the shingles themselves provide a waterproof roof. This sounds good, but I recently inspected a roof on a five (5) year old house (basically brand new) that had roof leaks EVERYWHERE. Upon inspection, it was clear that the roofer didn’t install underlayment. This basically “new” roof required a complete tear off and new roof including replacement of large portions of the roof deck itself. The general contractor that built this house skimped on a relatively cheap underlayment layer, and left the homeowners with a very large repair bill. I know the roofing contractor that got that job (not me), and they will get a proper installation this time. For the roofing contractors that identify that underlayment isn’t necessary, kindly explain to me why every shingle manufacturer includes underlayment in their installation instructions? There isn’t a shingle manufacturer in existence that doesn’t include underlayment in installation requirements, and not one of them will honor a warranty claim on their shingles without it. I fall into that underlayment is another component of the waterproofing system that protects the roof deck material itself. Underlayment provides a second line of defense against wind driven rain. In addition, have you ever seen a roof with a shingle or two blown off? If you lose a shingle due to wind and you have no underlayment you have a guaranteed roof leak. With underlayment you may not have a roof leak even if you lose a couple of shingles in a storm. However, wind driven rain gets everywhere, every nook and cranny, even causing water to flow uphill for short periods, and redundancy matters. My experience is that underlayment also serves a secondary purpose of establishing a smooth surface for you roofing shingles. In my previous series on roof decks, I identified that asphalt roofing shingles telegraph surface imperfections; a good quality underlayment is layer that ensures a perfectly smooth roof surface, thus eliminating potential to telegraph imperfections. For this reason, I always install 30-lb felt as underlayment as it provides a thicker surface that the cheaper 15-lb felt. 15-lb felt tears too easily around the nails or staples, tears too easily when walking on it to install the shingles, and is difficult to lay down without wrinkles. All of these tears lead to imperfections in the surface, and potentially lead to telegraphing through asphalt shingles. 30-lb roofing felt minimizes or eliminates these shortcomings. On a typical 30-square roof, 3,000 square feet of roof itself, underlayment material costs for 30-lb felt are ~$300. As your house is probably you largest investment, do you want to skimp $300 on the price of a new roof? Those homeowners I talked about earlier would have gladly paid $300 more for their new house to prevent the magnitude of roof repair they had to undertake on their “almost new” house. Seriously, that general contractor should be barred from obtaining any more building permits. If you need help with an issue such as this, contact a local Lees Summit roofing contractor for assistance. Residential roofs have slope, and water flows downhill. The slope of your roof provides a mechanism for the roof to shed water (gravity). However, there are areas of the roof that may allow water to accumulate. Think about a skylight or chimney; water is running down your roof and hits a chimney or skylight frame, what happens next? The flow of water off the roof is disturbed and there is potential for water accumulation; that water has to go somewhere. If you can’t direct water off your roof, it gets into your house via leaks in the roof. The picture I have included provides a perfect example of a chimney disturbing this water. Flashing is material used to waterproof the roof at penetrations through the roof deck or transitions in the roof deck. When you look at your roof, common penetrations would be chimneys, roof vents, plumbing vents, and skylights. Transitions are where the plane of the roof changes and would commonly be at crickets, vertical wall transitions, and valleys. The rest of the roof deck has other waterproofing materials (i.e. ice and water shield and underlayment); flashing works in conjunction with these elements to reinforce and supplement waterproofing at these critical areas. Gravity is very efficient, water is very damaging, and the combination of the two will leak water into every nook and cranny on your roof, which necessitates and that your roofing contractor install an effective waterproofing system. What flashing does is to ensure that any water that gets into these nooks and crannies gets efficiently redirected back out to the topside of the roofing material, where it belongs. Flashing is often installed in multiple layers (called counter-flashing), and seams are frequently sealed (especially important around chimneys and vertical wall transitions). With waterproofing, redundancy and details matter. With masonry chimneys, even the best flashing may not be enough as masonry itself is porous and absorbs water; even a minute amount of water behind the waterproofing system needs to get out. On the picture, the chimney flashing is typical but far from correct and will allow for water leak between the chimney and the flashing itself as water sheds down the vertical chimney. A proper installation would have the flashing embedded into the mortar, so water running down the outside of the chimney would be redirected to the roof surface. This is not an inexpensive house; these homeowners are going to be very disappointed. If you experience a roof leak, more often than not it is because of improperly installed, improperly detailed, or deteriorated flashing. When I inspect roofs to repair leaks (vs. replacing roofs), the first place I inspect when I get on the roof is the flashing. This element is critical to get right, and to get right from the beginning. The next question becomes what is the best. That is easy, heavy gauge copper, overlapped and lead-soldered at any joints. Look at old slate roofs (>50 years old), and this is what you will find. Copper is expensive, lead solder is dangerous for the installer, and roof materials that aren’t intended to last hundreds of years don’t warrant flashing material that does. In residential roofing, the flashing I use is galvanized steel. When selecting a roofing contractor, finding one that gets uber-excited when talking flashing details should be one of your selection criteria. As a roofing contractor, I field a lot of questions about different components of a roof. Enough so that I think a series of blog topics to educate on all the parts would be useful for my prospective clients (and honestly for any homeowner, even if you don’t call me). In a previous series, I thoroughly discussed roof decking (planks, plywood, OSB, installation), typically all installed by carpenters and not by roofers, but what roofers have to start with. In this series, I will discuss all the parts that go under the shingles (and that you don’t otherwise see). Let me know if you find these blogs useful. When you look at a roof, what do you see? Shingles, they are the visible finish layer. Maybe some metal around penetrations (i.e. chimney, roof vents, plumbing vents, and skylights). Just how much is “below the surface” and more importantly, how much does it matter? Like many things, the devil is in the details and the preparation before the shingles is critical to preventing roof leaks. Some of the items that you don’t see are: 1) Drip Edge (previous blog on this topic) 2) Flashing 3) Ice and Water Shield (previously covered in blog series on ice jams) 4) Underlayment 5) Starter Strips 6) How transitions in the roof are detailed (pitch transitions, chimneys, crickets, headwall, sidewall, valleys, dormers, roof intersections) All of these details get addressed and materials installed before the first shingle gets installed. That is a lot that is “below the surface” and in some subsequent blog topics on these materials Williams Roofing & Construction will delve into importance of each, because all of these really do matter when it comes to installing a long-lasting and leak-free asphalt shingle roof. You will never look at your roof the same way again. |
Bobby WilliamsWe are an experienced Lees Summit roofing company with over 15 years experience in repair, service and installation. Archives
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