Want the best cedar shake shingles in Portland? We got ‘em!
Better quality cedar shakes mean 80% lower maintenance over the life of your roof.
It’s taken us 25 years but we did it! We have worked hard enough and smart enough to get big enough to get the best mills in Canada to make us our own top quality cedar shakes! This is a huge blessing for all involved. A real win-win situation. The standards are nothing short of perfection. What this means to you is that we are skipping all of the middle men! Those middle men markups traditionally add up to $30 to $70 per square for a homeowner. With our new Canadian sourcing, we can bring absolute top-quality cedar shake shingles to Portland and supply them to our customers for just a little more than all the others offer lower grade crappy shakes. It’s a beautiful thing! Continue Reading…
In Roofing, Quality is Never an Accident
The lowest bidder put the roof on your home when it was built. That’s how they do it in production homes. The guy who can do it the fastest and the cheapest wins.
Unfortunately for home owners who need to replace their roof, a lot of replacement roofing contractors follow the same line of thought. Sell the re-roof for a cheap price and then cut every corner in the book. Fast is the standard rule for these guys, and most times, important details are overlooked for the sake of the almighty dollar. Quality is a choice. We don’t even bid on new construction, because we won’t compromise the amount of quality required as a trade-off in speed, skill and durability.
“Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.“
Good Roofing Materials - Lousy Installation
Here is another low bid re-roof project where the homeowner got the short end of the stick. Of course, they thought they were getting a smoking hot deal. This 1st picture is of a roof on the weather side dormer on the front of a home valued at over $900,000. It was recently completed in the Alameda District of Portland, Oregon. The weather side of a home in Portland means it faces southwest. All of our serious wet weather comes from that direction. This is not a wall to cut corners on!
We had reroofed a neighbor to this home and also got a chance to make a presentation on this project. We ended up not getting the chance to serve them. They did get a short educational presentation made by the one and only Tony St. Pierre. They chose to use another well-known roofing company in Portland, known for being one of the cheapest Roofing Contractors in town. The contractor decided that it would be too much effort to flash this front dormer sidewall.
Instead, they decided to shove the high-end shingles (Camelot by GAF/ELK…top quality) under the siding trim board without any flashings! (GAF/ELK, the manufacturer, would “pass a brick” if they saw this type and kind of installation.)
Roof Leak Clues: The Single Nail in the Key Way
In 1995, an unknown roofer placed a solitary nail right in the middle of this roof’s drain area. From the ground, it looks like just a bunch of roofing up there, and as long as it’s not leaking you feel pretty good about everything. But that nail was in a key way. That’s the roofing term for the space between the cedar shakes. It’s a very important part of a cedar roof…in getting water off your roof and into the drains. When it rains, your shake roof traffics all the water through these areas. So, when the idiot disguised as a roofer nailed that single nail into a key way 12 years ago, he set a very expensive series of events into motion. It’s almost unbelievable what this nail did.
Snakebit! How an expensive Portland roof was ruined on the day it was installed…SIX years ago!
Almost looks like snakebite doesn’t it? This picture shows the staple holes from beneath a cedar shake. The felt underlayment material should not be rotted away. It’s one of many such holes we found on a 6-year-old roof in West Linn, Oregon. The homeowner called us because this roof was leaking in at least 20 places! When we took the roof apart, we found what you’re seeing in the picture. When you’ve seen as many roofs as we have, solving this mystery was a piece of cake.
We asked the homeowner if he knew who roofed his home. He confirmed that it was a local roofing contractor, still in business in Portland. This should have been a super roof! It was installed with ¾ inch, 50-year CCA, treated cedar shakes. Other than routine maintenance, this roof should have outlived the homeowner! We advised the homeowner to contact the roofing contractor to get his roof replaced under a workmanship warranty.
How Roof Maintenance can Save Your Residential Community Thousands in Replacement Costs
Here’s a case study to show how communities can save thousands of dollars by simply maintaining their roofs.
Property: Village at Forest Heights, Portland Oregon
Size of roof on property: 885 squares on a pitch of 8/12.
Current replacement value: $693,000
Degradation schedule if left unmaintained is 15% during the first 5 years, 25% in the second 5 years, 35% in the 3rd 5 years and then between the 15th and 20th year the roof will need to be replaced. If you use simple math you can see what unmaintained degradation costs.
If the roof is treated every 5 years with a environmentally gentle but effective wood preservative treatment (we don’t use harsh chemicals, and we don’t recommend pressure-washing for roof maintenance) the degradation is held to 15% every 5 years. If repairs are made on the roof every 5 years prior to treatment, the repairs will blend in for a uniform appearance.
There are 200 shakes in each square of roofing. The Village has 885 squares.
That’s 177,000 shakes on the property. 15% degradation would mean replacing an average of 2,655 shakes every 5 years.
We replaced 4,706 shakes in 2007 as a 10-12 year old roof with no previous maintenance. This is a very good roof for new construction. (Quality of shakes in new construction varies, but is seldom this good.)
Let’s forecast the expenses to properly maintain this roof……
Treatment in 2012 will be $35,400 (at current prices, unadjusted for inflation)
Repairs will be an average of 2,655 shakes for $18,585.
Total maintenance expense in 2012 is estimated to be $53,985. And remember, the value of your shake roof is increasing as it ages, due to replacement costs. In 2007, shake prices went up $100 a square. On this property alone, that’s an increase in value of $88,500.
Because of proper maintenance, this 17-year-old roof is at 30% of its expected service life while un-maintained cedar roofs of the same age are being totally replaced all over Portland.
How old is your cedar roof? Ready to talk about maintaining it?
Why do my Skylights Leak?
I have been asked this question a lot over the last 25 years. It used to be only the finest of homes or remodeled homes had skylights. Because of that, there used to be a market for skylight installation specialists. Then in the beginning of the 90s it seemed like every house built had skylights. That trend continues today. Where have all the specialists gone?
You, as a homeowner, know that in a manufacturer’s product line, there are different levels of quality. A product may carry the same name, but with vast differences in grade and performance. All skylights are not the same. For example; a production type home builder would choose the least expensive. The quality of the components used in the skylight construction follow the cost. Basically, cheap skylights, cheap components!
If the leak is not from a poor install (pan metal, sidewall flashing, low nails, top edge screws, etc.) then it’s going to be from a worn out window seal. When the seals go out, your skylight will leak like a broken dam!
The only solution for bad seals is to replace the skylight top. When you have Roof Life of Oregon replace the skylight top, we always weather strip the new top to save you money in heating and cooling loss. The skylight represents the highest point in your home so all the heat is pulled to that point. The simple installation of that weather strip stops you from heating the great outdoors.
The solution to a bad install is to re-flash the curb into the roof correctly with top pan metal, side step flashings and bottom pan metal. Sometimes the problem can be solved by caulking the weather side of the flashing, stopping the wind driven rain.
Remember it is best to have a certified roof maintenance expert from Roof Life of Oregon look at your roof every 5 years. Catching these issues is your best and safest choice. The worst time to find out about your leaking skylights is during a storm!
The Day I Moved Mrs. Helen Geiger into her Living Room
It was just a “leak in my ceiling” call. At her door, Helen began to tell me of her concern that her roof was not working right. As I came to the door, I had noticed an unusually large amount of tree debris had been building up on her roof. She took me to a room near the front of her home that looked as if someone was currently using it as a sleeping room.
I was concerned that anyone would sleep here because less than 6 feet from the bed was an immense area of black, moldy, smelly drywall. I asked if anyone was sleeping in this room. It turns out that this was her temporary bedroom. Helen had lost her husband 2 years prior and couldn’t bring herself to sleep in the master bedroom yet. I ask her how long has the wall been like that? She told me at least a couple months, but from my experience, the mold had been there a lot longer than that.
Mold doesn’t just “happen” in your walls. It means that water is getting in or moisture is being trapped.
Helen was still mourning the loss of her husband of 52 years. He had taken care of all the maintenance of their home and she was at a loss for what to do. All I could think was, “I have to get her out of this room”. She was not ready to move back into the master bedroom as it held too many memories. So, with her permission, I moved the entire bedroom suite to the living room of the house, and counseled her to stay out of the other room completely and leave the door shut until we could clean up the problem. I shared with her that the kind of mold and mildew in that room causes a lot of health issues for others and I knew that an 8o-year-old didn’t need the exposure.
Helen’s roof needed to be replaced. Tree debris left on the roof through too many of Oregon’s winter-spring combinations had caused irreversible damage. The felt paper under the shakes had rotted from the retained moisture caused by the debris. The next step was to get that rotted sheetrock out of the room and dry the interior wall out, re-insulate, sheet rock, and paint.
We served her, and in the end, I came back over and moved her bedroom set back into her newly finished bedroom. Helen smiled, gave me a hug and said, “Thank you Patrick.”