Monday, November 20, 2006

Tamko Rustic Black - revisited

I noticed shingles on the ground last night when coming in from the backyard. Dammit.

Milady and I bought this house in November 2004 and almost immediately, shingles started falling off. I can't explain it from analyzing the shingles that hit the ground. They appear to be properly nailed and most of the tabs are glued down, yet inexplicably, six or eight shingles will turn loose and hit the ground. In the time I've been here, I've been on the roof eight times to replace individual shingles. Luckily, I haven't surfed a loose shingle to the ground. Yet.

This morning, my stepson and I replaced another half-dozen shingles that had worked loose. Tamko, rustic black shingles. They are easy to match, available at most supply stores.

I've roofed a few buildings in my time, and decided a long time ago that roofing wasn't a career path that I wanted to follow. It's good for some, but not for me.

I'm just about ready to call someone about putting a metal roof on this house. The idea of having a roof that I'll never have to replace has a certain appeal.

4 comments:

Rivrdog said...

Buy the roofing and do it yourself. The only roof I ever installed was metal, on my yacht club clubhouse, and after 5 minutes of OJT, I was walking it down and nailing like a pro. Easiest construction job I ever did.

A set of air or electric nibblers is the only advanced tool you'll need. Working the flashing around chimneys, vents, etc is, well, like working the flashing on a composition shingle roof.

BTW, we roofed a 2600 square foot building with an arch (Quonset) roof for about $5800 worth of roofing, felt etc at contractor price.

The toughest thing is handling the long metal slabs of roofing. It's easy to not handle them right and have them buckle, and you have to toss the buckled ones, or use them for short pieces with the buckled area cut out.

Also, doing metal involves a complete tear-off, and installation of roofing felt first.

I wouldn't have any other roofing, provided metal is allowed with neighborhood CC&Rs.

Jim Austin said...

TAMKO offers an attractive line of metal shingles you may want to consider. Take a look around.

Pawpaw said...

Thanks for the input, guys.

Dog - the roof on this house is just steep enough that I'm not comfortable on it. I've done a lot of shingle roofing during my younger days, actually put myself through a year of college by roofing. I don't like the slope of my own roof. I'll pay someone to do it.

Jim. I don't want any type of shingle. When I contract for the metal roof, it will be a standing edge roof. Milady will pick the colors. Thanks for the links to your article on oil canning. It was informative and educated me on a problem that I haven't seen in these latitudes.

Anonymous said...

I honestly don't recommend going with Tamko. They are a little shaky when it comes to living up to their warranties. We purchased a resale house with a 4 year old metal roof that therefore had 46 years left on its warranty. We contacted both the installer and Tamko and after more than a 6 month runaround they THEN told us that because the warranty hadn't been transitioned within 30 days they would not honour it. We had done nothing to the roof, and in fact were wanting to add ice picks to it and wanted to make sure we had this done by an approved roofer so as not to void our warranty.

If they do not feel comfortable about honouring a 4 year old roof warranty, and their customer response just to answer this question is so long in coming, how confident are they in their own product?