At 6:30 on Saturday morning, June 6, my dad backed his truck up our driveway with his air compressor strapped in the bed, and Gary walked over from next door carrying his roofing nailer like a lunch box. Tessa came out with a pot of coffee and four mugs. Moose watched from the kitchen window until the compressor kicked on, then left the room. He has feelings about loud machines.
By Sunday evening, our detached garage had its first new roof since the 1990s. Here's how three guys and one very good ground crew did it in a weekend.
The roof and the plan
The garage is a 1952 one-car, 12 by 20, with a low-pitch gable roof. The eaves are maybe 8 feet off the ground, which is the main reason this was ever a DIY candidate. The old roof was 1990s 3-tab shingles, curled at the edges and dropping granules into the gutter every time it rained.
A roofer quoted $3,400 for tear-off and new architectural shingles. Our version came to $1,315: $1,140 in materials (architectural shingles, synthetic underlayment, ice and water shield, drip edge) and $175 for a Bagster, which is $30 for the bag and $145 for the pickup. The $2,085 difference stays with us, which is good news, because the furnace is coming in August.
The one place I was tempted to cut corners was the ice and water shield, the sticky membrane that goes along the first three feet above the eaves. It's a garage, I said. Gary didn't let me finish. "Water always wins," he said, and that ended the discussion.
Saturday: tear-off
The roles sorted themselves out fast. Dad and I worked on the roof. Gary ran the ground: he set up a cutting station on sawhorses, sighted our lines from the driveway and called out anything crooked, which was more often than I'd like. Tessa was the ground crew, and I want it on the record that she had the hardest job of the weekend. Every shingle we pried off slid down into the grass or the wheelbarrow, and she hauled it down the driveway to the Bagster, load after load, then ran a magnetic sweeper over the lawn so nobody would find a roofing nail with a bare foot or a paw.
Tear-off with a roofing shovel went faster than I expected, since a single layer of 3-tab comes up in sheets once you get under it. Pulling the leftover nails took longer. The board sheathing underneath was in better shape than I feared, with a couple of boards near the back eave that had worked loose and just needed new nails into the rafters. By about 2 p.m. the deck was bare, swept and covered: drip edge along the eaves, the ice and water shield, synthetic underlayment over the rest, then drip edge on the rakes over the underlayment.
It was June, so the silver maple dropped helicopters on us all afternoon, and they stuck to the ice and water shield like it was flypaper. I was glad the arborist had cleaned the deadwood out of that tree in February. Kneeling under its branches all day, I thought about that more than once.
Sunday: shingles
Sunday was the starter strip, then the shingles, then the ridge cap. Dad ran Gary's nailer, I fed him shingles and snapped chalk lines, and we traded places every few courses so my forearms could recover. Gary adjusted the compressor so the nails sat flush instead of punching through the shingle, which is the kind of thing you only know if someone who's done it a hundred times stands there and tells you.
My mistake came on the second course. I nailed four shingles a good inch above the nailing strip, the zone where the nails are supposed to land so the next course covers them. My dad noticed, said "Nope" in the same voice he used when I was 12, and had me pull them. Four shingles, fifteen minutes, and I didn't miss the strip again all day.
We set the last ridge cap at about 4:30 with thunder rumbling somewhere over Wyoming. The rain held off until after dinner, and I stood in the garage listening to it hit a roof that didn't leak. The Bagster truck came for the bag on Tuesday, and the driveway looks like nothing ever happened.
What it cost, besides money
Two days, $1,315, two sore shoulders (mine) and a sunburn on the back of my neck that Tessa warned me about at 9 a.m. Gary's payment was a six-pack and a promise that his nailer would come back cleaned and oiled. Dad's was dinner, which my mom says absolutely counts as him getting paid.
