Roof time!

A few weeks ago I looked up in at my ceiling and noticed that there were some wet spots. Not good. Not a surprise either. My roof has had a few patches done over the years, but for the most part it's original. Since my house was built in 1955, the roof was far far overdue to be redone.

So, first off, my house has a very low-pitch roof. The pitch of the roof is basically its angle, but roofers don't talk about the angle of the roof, they talk about the pitch which is how many feet across to how many feet up it goes.

various roof pitches

In order to use asphalt shingles at all you need at least a 3/12 pitch, but even then you need to do them in a special way. A 4/12 or 5/12 pitch is more common.

One of the coolest architectural features of mid-century modern homes is their low roof pitch. Most of the time they're about a 2/12 pitch. My roof has a 1/12 pitch. Back in the 1950s they'd do a "built up" roof out of tar and gravel. They would basically put paper over the top of the roof just like you would for shingles but instead of putting shingles over that they would spray the whole roof with tar, making it into essentially one gigantic shingle. They would then spread gravel over that to reflect the sun's hot rays in the summer and keep the house from getting so hot. 

I didn't want a built up roof because they're not the best for the environment, leaks can be hard to spot, it's easier to put insulation under a membrane roof, and a membrane roof can do a better job reflecting the sun's radiation.

so, what is a membrane roof you ask. A membrane roof is one where they basically take sheets of waterproof material, spread them over your roof and weld or glue the seams. It's very easy for them to add a few inches of panel insulation to the roof while they're doing it.

So, here's my roof job :)

The first step is to tear off the old roof. This took us about a day and a half with a lot of thanks to My Parents, Corey and his wife Liz, Trent, my room mate Loren, and Jake. 

We did quite a bit of the tear off on a Friday night. Sorry, ladies, that wasn't why I didn't ask any of you out.

Here you can see the "roof patches" They were not done well and were wet underneath.

The sun is setting and there's still a lot of work to do

Getting a little late, but we had to get it done. Right about here my roofer called and asked if we'd looked at the weather radar.

Turns out it was about to rain even though the weather report said 0% chance of precipitation. We ran to the hardware store and bought plastic. Here you see Loren who helped us battle the wind to get this plastic nailed down. 

We got up bright and early the next morning to take all the junk to the dump and tore the plastic and the rest of the old roof off. 

At the same time the roofers came and started doing their installation. I didn't get any photos of that progress but here are some of how it sits now:

half of the roof

the other half of the roof

the original fascia was wood and some of it had to be replaced like this

the front has fascia on one side and none on the other. This looked weird. Also, there was no eave at all which meant water dripping allong the wall. So, we had the roofer add these 2x6s and 2x4s to essentially make a 2 inch eave. 

Metal fascia will go along the eave to give it a uniform roof line all across

here you can see the new roof layers. Below is the wood we replaced on the end. Above that is the sheathing you normally see on the top of a roof. Above that are two 2x4s stacked on top of each other to sit flush with the 4 inches of insulation installed over the roof top. 

Just wanted to show a picture of a slight electrical adjustment we had to make. The power lines sat flush with the house and were bolted to the roof sheathing. SCARY!! We anchored a piece of unistrut to the wall and moved everything to that. 

That's the state of the roof right now. It's water proof but the fascia and soffits haven't been installed. I'll publish an update when they are. For now, enjoy!

UPDATE

The roof is done and looks fantastic!

please enjoy a few photos and try to imagine you can't see the landscaping disaster zone

Thanks for following along!