Two-Story Tear-Off and Re-Deck in Duration COOL Mountain Side

On this Anaheim job the homeowner filled it in himself. Three lines, in his handwriting. Not one of them is about shingles.

He had dogs. He had a pool. He had a satellite dish on the roof that had not pointed at anything in a long time. Nothing about wind rating. Nothing about granule loss. Nothing about how long the shingle would last.

He was not worried about the roof. He was worried about everything under it.

Which is fair, because a tear-off is a demolition job. Two layers of roofing, the original wood shake included, plus every nail that ever held either one down, all of it coming off a roof that hangs over a swimming pool.

You can rake a lawn. You can hose a patio. A pool is different. One good handful of shake and grit goes in and you are not cleaning it, you are draining it.

So the pool went under plastic before the first shingle came off. The furniture got tarped. The windows got masked with plastic and tape. And the crew went into the garage with the homeowner and covered what was in there, because the garage roof was coming off too, and a garage with an open deck over it is just a room with weather in it.

The dogs were the other line, and they are the one most crews would have read straight past. A tear-off is loud. Gates open and close all day. Strangers are on the house from seven in the morning. A dog that gets out on day one turns a roof job into the worst week of somebody's life.

It went on the addendum because things on the addendum get read at the morning meeting. Things said in the driveway get forgotten by lunch.

And the dish came off. Line seven: Satellite/Antenna, Remove, circled. An old dish is a set of bolts driven through a roof deck, and every one of those holes is somewhere water can find later. It is the smallest thing on his list and the easiest one to leave for another day. It came off with the roof.

Then, with the pool under plastic and the dogs accounted for, we got to the part he had not asked about.

The roof measured 2,941 square feet across four planes, 1,170 of it on the second story. Tear-off started Monday, October 28. Under the composition shingle sat the home's original wood shake, and under that, skip sheathing: spaced boards with a deliberate gap between every one, the way shake roofs were built so the wood could breathe.

That deck had to go, all of it. We wrote about why at length on our Orange re-deck project, because it is the same story in most Orange County homes of this era. The short version: composition shingle needs continuous wood behind it, and a gap is not wood.

The crew sheathed the house in half-inch OSB across October 29 and 30, running 264 linear feet of new 1x8 shiplap along the way. By the thirtieth the roof was completely re-sheeted.

And there was more wood than the contract allowed for.

There always might be. That is the nature of a roof. An estimator prices what he can see, and what he can see is the surface. The contract allowed 100 linear feet of roof deck and 50 linear feet of starter board and fascia. The deck wanted more than that, and once the homeowner could see the fascia with the roof off, he wanted more of that replaced too.

Here is the part that matters. The rate was already printed on the contract he signed on October 16, in the wood replacement notice: sixteen dollars per linear foot. When the additional 152 feet went in on November 1, the change order was written at sixteen dollars a foot. Not renegotiated. Not marked up because we were already on the roof and he had no leverage. The same number he had been looking at since the day he signed.

The city of Anaheim passed the deck inspection on October 31, before anything went over it. Then the roof got built up in order: new white two-inch drip edge, WeatherLock self-sealing membrane, synthetic underlayment across the field, starter strip around the perimeter, and then shingle.

The shingle is Duration COOL in Mountain Side, a solar-reflective gray with a light speckle that sits cool against brown stucco instead of fighting it. The addendum names it, and names Midnight as the fallback if Mountain Side could not be had. It could.

Ridge vents run the peaks. Every roof jack and cap on the house was replaced and painted to match the field, which is why the finished aerials read as one surface with almost no hardware in them.

Six working days from tear-off to finish, October 28 to November 2. The city passed final inspection on November 6. We walked the job with the homeowner on November 21.