Roofing… end of Day 1

So, the roofers have redeemed themselves.  They showed up early Monday and worked right through until 6pm and were back again at 7am today.  They’ve done all the demolition/removal work, repaired some rotten roof decking, and started doing the ice and water shield.

What a difference having the area between the two dormers open makes to the overall look of the house.

After a discussion with the roofers about our poor condition stucco on the West side of the house, we’re considering changing that dormer area to cedar shingles, and getting rid of the Tudor elements that are there.  We already have cedar in the dormer on the North side of the house (about the same size), so it wouldn’t really be against the original style elements, and it would allow us to leave the (slightly better condition) stucco on the Front (south), and East side elevations for next year (we don’t want to lose those Tudor elements).  We’re waiting for a quote.  If we do go with cedar shingles on this dormer, we can replace the asphalt skirting on the cantilevered sun porch with cedar shingles as well, which will tie things together nicely.

The sun porch metal roof was two layers thick and in pretty bad shape.  Here are some before, and ‘in-progress’ pictures:

 

And finally, here are a couple pictures of the exposed wooden roof decking for the small portion that cuts across the second level of the front elevation (it was getting dark, sorry for the poor quality).  It was previously covered with a painted galvanized metal apron, and will be covered with a new metal apron shortly.

If you look closely, you can see what our roofers are calling the ‘ski-jump’ angle of the roof.  Basically, all our eaves and small roofs at the base of the dormers have this change in angle.  It will look quite nice when clad with the new metal apron.

The roofers were unfortunately not able to match our existing wooden trim that is rotten, however they are salvaging and consolidating the stuff in decent condition and putting that in the most visible areas (lower roof elevations in the front), and found a reasonable match to use in the less obvious areas.

One of the roofers found the remnants of a pigeon nest in between the dormers with 2 eggs intact and said he felt bad about having to remove it (that nest has been inaccessible for a few weeks now, so I told him not to worry).  then he found an intact nest of starlings with 4 baby birds inside.  They found an opening into the soffit area through a previous metal patch that had lifted at the corner of our roof.  They had to replace the decking, so they were very careful and made a new opening in the trim work on the soffit so that parents could get in and out.  We’ll get the wildlife control people to come back in a couple weeks once the birds fledge.

We’re also getting rid of our whirly-bird (turbine) roof vent and putting in a new roof vent like this:

http://www.ventilation-maximum.com/English/product-model301.html

This type of roof vent is ideal as we have a lot of snow in the winter.  They are relocating it from the front roof slope to the rear so it’s less visible from the front of the house.  We may get some lower gable vents as well to help with attic ventilation as we can’t do soffit vents (the brick comes above the roof eaves and as a result we have closed soffits).

Lastly (sorry, long post), the roofers were kind enough to help install our new top damper for our parlor fireplace.  You can see it at the top of the chimney in the first picture on this page.  Now we can seal our fireplace flue from the top via the stainless steel cable that comes down our chimney.