A Whole New Roof

Every year, we go back to Solon where I grew up. Funny thing, our roof was turning green from moss. We needed a new roof.

Here's my dad's take on how the re-roofing project went. (In a nutshell. Good: can see through skylight. Bad: lost Direct TV....no more movies for Ken & Ginger!!)

"Our house was built in 1985. The cedar shingles needed cleaning and treating with Linseed oil every couple of years. More recently, the shingles began to grow moss and buckle and the estimated repair cost was $4500. So we decided to replace the cedar shingles with asphalt ones, because they look attractive and are essentially maintenance-free.

It took the workers(as many as 8 at one time) an entire week to remove the rotten old shingles, strip and clean the roof to bare wood and then lay new tar paper over the roof and install new asphalt shingles over that.

Since the shingles are fixed to the roof by nails, thousands of nails had to be removed and thousands of new nails had to be pounded back to the new shingles, so this has been a very noisy and hectic week.

The new shingles are Architectural singles made of sands/pebbles glued together by asphalt into a sheet form; they look quite three-dimensional. They carry a 30-year warranty and are maintenance-free. We also replaced two sky lights since the old ones were cracked and became opaque.

We took down the satellite and suspended our Direct TV service for now. If I can live with just the over-the-air free TV, we will cancel DTV in the future.

So far we are quite happy with the new roof, especially because we can see clearly through the sky lights for the first time in years!"