Thursday, November 29, 2007

A new roof over our heads

No, we're not moving, just replacing the shingles.

Out house is almost 11 years old, and the roof was looking pretty bad. I figured I was going to have to bite the bullet, and shell out the $15,000 to replace it. In comes mother nature, and American Family Insurance to save us. We noticed many of our neighbors getting new roofs, and found out all of them had hail damage from this past August's storms. We called our agent, he sent out an adjuster, and sure enough, we've got hail damage. Hot diggity dog!

We found out it would be covered by insurance while I was down at Jingle Cross. I called a couple contractors this past Monday. One of them came out that day, gave us a reasonable estimate, and started work on Tuesday morning. Even better, the snow that was supposed to fall Tuesday night, never materialized.

During the tear off process, the contractor noticed the previous roofer never put any ice & water barrier on the edges of the roof. Code states you need to cover the edges of the roof, to a foot past the overhang. Thankfully there was no damage, but I'm pretty pissed the original roofer didn't follow code.

We are switching from the older style 3-tab shingles to the newer style dimensional shingles (see the difference below). Hopefully this roof will last longer than 10 years.

Traditional 3-tab Shingles

Dimensional Shingles

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Careful, I heard the dimensional shingels allow the aliens to listen to your thoughts, unless you wear a tinfoil hat.