Roofing - Day 1

Started about noon, and tore off the shingles with my friends Craig and Russ. We started on the toughest part of the house, where we had to replace damaged wood near the chimney, board up the vent holes, and learn how to best apply the weather guard. I learned a few lessons:

• Working to carefully roll up and remove long sheets of shingles is more efficient then tearing them off section by section working apart.
• Weather guard is kind of annoying to apply. The plastic covering the adhesive back does not come off super easily, but it is not THAT sticky, and once removed it can be moved around and is very workable.
• Carefully removing nails and staples and sweeping the desk clean, and then using the more expensive 30# roofing felt yields a deck which is smooth and easy to walk on.
• Chimneys are tricky to work around. I should have studied up or brought up my roofing book so Craig didn't have to work so hard to figure it out.
• I applied more weather
• Roofing is fun.

Tomorrow we will removc the rest of the existing shingles and install weather guard and tar paper on the rest of the house. We also need to board up two small vents over the garage so we can install the ridge vent there. I used twice the amount of weather guard I probably needed over the house. This will result in better protection against ice dams, and I figured that I should do it right. Owens Corning specifies to install the weather underlayment 2 feet past the interior wall line, but an area roofer says they install it 6 feet back from the roof edge. So I am installing a double layer on the main house. The garage will just get a single course. It's unheated anyway.

In the morning tomorrow I will go to the store for screws, roofing tar, and drip edge. I thought we could reuse the drip edge but I don't like how it looks on the side. I think I should be able to remove the existing drip edge and replace it pretty easily. Also I will remove some of the siding to make shingle installation go faster on Monday.

That was Day 1. Thank you Craig and Russ!