by Frank Davey, Project Manager
These long tree branches have been scraping the roof on Meadow Arbor 2 for some time. That will need to be fixed!
Hello everyone! I’m a bit late on this roofing follow-up to my last submission.
We discovered there are practices some roofing companies follow to make a roof repair worth their trip and “warrantee-able.” When patching “tree branch raked” damaged sections, many roofing companies will remove shingles from the ridge line down to and past the point where the last layer of roof felt overlaps the underlying one. This is why the number of squares needing to be replaced seems excessive. The damaged areas “seen” seem much less than the proposed square footage the roofing company says needs to replaced. This makes sense in some ways, because they don’t want to have to come back and repair something hard to see that later caused problems.
However, if you know what you are doing, there are ways to patch specific smaller damaged areas by carefully removing the damaged areas without causing “new” damage to viable shingles and felt. DIYers need to know enough about roofing installation to tackle these jobs or hire a knowledgeable handy man experienced in roof repair and not afraid of taking this route.
Know that patched areas can be more prone to leakage because of driving rain, but if ample roofing tar is correctly used and new shingles are correctly nailed and overlapped, these patches can easily carry the full life expectancy of the existing roof.
Careful attention to these details can shave costs off a rehab that borders on not being profitable, but still let you end up with a house you are proud to sell. That is our hope with the Meadow Arbor projects.