House Roof

Last week we took advantage of several days of dry weather to replace half of the house roof.

Here are the backhoe and the construction dumpster ready to catch the old shingles:

The old roof:

Scraping off the old shingles with shingle rakes:

There were 4 layers of dirty, dusty, sticky asphalt shingles to remove, as you can see here:

Bits of asphalt shingle with nailer boards underneath. Some of the nailer boards were immensely wide and must have come from enormous trees. They were in relatively good shape for the age of the house:

Clapboard siding where the two roofs meet. There isn't much siding as most of the house is limestone, so we are planning to keep what little there is and paint it white as it originally was:

After the roof was cleared and swept we started putting down new cedar shake shingles:

All in all the project went very smoothly. The cedar roof looks fantastic with the house's limestone facade. More importantly, it is raining as I write and we have no leaks! We will start on the other half of the roof as soon as the weather allows and I hope to have pictures of the finished product very soon.