Making the best cedar shakes
My supplier in Canada sent me this video. This is one of his workers, creating the cedar shakes we put on the roofs of homes in Portland. Kinda scary!
Roof Ventilaton: Key to a longer lasting roof
It might surprise you that seven out of ten roofs that we inspect on a daily basis for maintenance are under-ventilated. Most of these roofs are of the architectural composition type. Some very popular Portland, Oregon roofing contractors put on the roofs in the last 13-15 years.
Their popularity will prove to be short-lived, as their oversight will cost Portlanders millions of dollars in the lost service life of their roofing material.
The National Roofing Contractors Assoc. stated in 2007 that the number one cause of premature roof failure in America is improper ventilation. Why is this happening? Perhaps one reason is that most low cost, high volume roofers use roofing crews that get paid by the footage. Speed is the key. A supervisor stretched thin can only catch so much. The roofing contractor working on small margins will let things slide. A homeowner getting 15 years out of his 40-yr roof takes a distant second to his immediate needs. You spending 30-40% more in energy to cool and heat your home doesn’t even concern this roofing contractor. Do you see the problem here?
Damage from improper roof ventilation can include:
- Roof granular (tiny rocks on your shingles) will fall off into the gutters
- Spider cracks in the fiberglass mat.
- Plywood underlayment will bow and de-laminate
- Poisonous molds, mildew, and fungus can grow in your attic space.
If an under-ventilated roof is left to run its barrage of problems, the homeowner will have to replace the plywood, spray the attic space for mold and mildew damage, cut in the right amount of ventilation and then re-roof it again. Don’t look to the manufacture of the shingle to help you with the costs of your replacement because their warranty was voided when the contractor under-ventilated the roof.
The first thing that Roof Life of Oregon does as a GAF Master Elite Roofing Contractor when called to your home for a roof replacement proposal is to check the attic. Correct ventilation is a top priority in getting the full service life out of a roofing system. Both intake as well as exiting air is critically important. For every 200 square feet of attic space, a roof needs 64 cubic inches of intake/exhaust. This will keep the roofing cool and create a barrier of active air that will save you 1000’s of dollars. We don’t stop there either; we continue roofing your home by installing complementary roofing components that will last you a lifetime.
A roof engineered to last a lifetime. Roof Life of Oregon has Portland’s only transferable lifetime workmanship warranty for roofing.
We’d be happy to come inspect your roof ventilation.
Roof Life of Oregon - Radio ad for November, 2008
November’s roofing ad for Roof Life of Oregon.
Just a quick inspection is all it takes to find out if your Portland roof needs to be replaced.
New Roof Life of Oregon Video
I got a new online video made for Roof Life of Oregon. It will soon replace the video on the home page, but here’s a sneak peak! I did a new video for 1st Oregon Exteriors at the same time. You can have a look at it on our Portland exterior remodeling blog.
I think it came out well. I hope it gives you a feel for my passion about roofing in Portland!
What do you think? Are you ready to let us look at your roof?
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.