Shingling

            The felt or the new underpayment has been installed and it time to begin shingling or tiling the roof. I prefer shingles over tiles personally.  Tiles do not last forever and when the felt wares out the cost difference favors shingles. When I do shingle, I highly recommend Malarkey Shingles and I favor the solar reflective roofing products, because it gets me through the California regulations easily. When you apply for your permits to re shingle your home you need to know the number of roofs layers that will be on your home. It can not be three or more now. If you have two now then you must strip them off before shingling and the inspector will want to come look at the sheathing for nailing and damaged sheets which need replacing. They may want to know the CRRC numbers which can be looked up on line. CRRC stands for Cool Roof Rating Council. Once this is accomplished and you pay for the permit you can felt and begin the process. I use square cap nails for felting because they grip much more than normal roofing nails.

Before nailing look under the eaves to see if you nail shingle into an open or closed eave. If you see the rafter tails sides and bottoms you have open eaves. This is important because you don’t want to have nail points showing though. In California we use a lot of open eaves so I prefer to hand nail my first row of shingles and do so until I have past the exterior walls so the nail point do not show. Some people use starting strips, other of us simply turn our first shingle upside down and our second one on top of it with the proper set back from the edge.  This number varies from manufacture to manufacture so look it up on line or sometimes you can find it on the bundle. I use a roofing hammer with the guides that adjust so the 5 ¼ inch requirement from the bottom is gauged by my hammer but I do use the tape measure to pull the 8” setback which Malarkey recommends. I do not use four nails per shingle because I do not know of a place that has weather conditions which would permit that under-nailing. I use six nails per shingle. I start from left to right. And pull control lines every four rows to insure I come squarely to the top.

This project goes mush faster with two people. One feeds the shingles and the other nails them in place. I prefer to work alone it’s a gift my time in the service keeps giving. The feeder places them in the proper position and as the person nailing is finishing nailing the feeder places the next shingle. Make sure your ladder is tied off to the roof. A cable through a C lamp or large mouth channel lock works great and these are offer sold where you purchase shingle from a supplier. They also have retractable cables which fasten to harnesses which offer the fall protection. Falls from roofs are a leading cause of injury and sometimes death so you must keep you head on roofs at all time and because the tasks being preformed often need our attention it is advised that a professional is used for these tasks. Professionals have the licenses, insurance and experience to perform these tasks with minimum risk. Often there are no warranties if the roof isn’t installed by a professional.

Note: Images on this blog site are from a free source or taken by the author. No image or group of photos is intended to represent the people the author serves. The author does not care about Race (that is a politically correct term that he does not like because we are all of the same Race, the Human Race. He prefers the term ethnicity, color, religion, sex, gender, marital status, disability, genetic information, national origin, source of income, Veteran or military status, ancestry, citizenship, primary language or immigration status.) He is a service provider for all people. We will all rise together when we band together and help one another. Joseph Erwin is a Real Estate Broker, DRE # O2131799, and a CA general contractor # B 696662. He’s a member of the CRMLS and The East Valley Association of Realtors located in the Inland Empire region of Southern California.