FEATURED PROJECT
A two-layer composition tear-off on a single-story ranch in Anaheim. We stripped both layers, replaced 100 linear feet of deck and 50 of fascia, then installed Owens Corning Shasta White shingles with ridge vents.
About this project
When we walked this Anaheim ranch in October 2024, the roof was carrying two full layers of composition shingle. One had been laid over the other years back, which is the cheaper move at the time and the expensive one later.
Add 11 solar panels, a satellite dish, and a rooftop antenna on top of that, and nobody had actually seen the wood deck underneath in a very long time. The homeowner did not want another patch. He wanted the whole thing off and done right, including the low-slope section over the patio that had already been stripped and tarred more than once.
The numbers we started with
3,277 square feet of roof across four planes, roughly 33 squares, house and attached garage, two layers of composite to remove.
We tore off both layers down to the original plank decking and pulled every nail. The aging shingles and exposed low-slope section shown in the before photos were only part of it. The antenna went to the dump. The dish came off. The 11 solar panels came off under their own City of Anaheim permit, because in California a detach and reset is its own permitted scope, not something you quietly slide panels aside for.
Once the deck was open, you could see why the two-layer approach had run out of road. The exposed rafters and plank decking in the tear-off photo show sections that were done.
Two layers hides everything. You do not know what the wood looks like until it is all off and the nails are pulled. That is why we do not price deck repair as a guess, we price it as linear feet once we can actually see it.
We replaced 100 linear feet of roof deck and 50 linear feet of starter board and fascia before anything else touched the roof. Then synthetic underlayment across the field, ice and water barrier where it belongs, and a starter strip run around the full perimeter.
Inspected twice, not once
The City of Anaheim signed off on the deck before we covered it, and again on the finished roof at final. Both passed. A deck inspection is the one that matters most, because after the underlayment goes down nobody can check the wood again for 30 years.
Shasta White was the color choice, and it does more than look clean on a white ranch. Light granules reflect more solar heat than dark ones, which matters on a single-story house in Orange County where the attic sits right above the living space. We ran ridge vents the length of the ridge so the attic can actually exhaust, then painted the new roof jacks and caps to match rather than leaving a row of mismatched metal across a brand new roof.
Vents are not optional on a house like this. You put a tight new roof on a hot attic with no exhaust and you have just built an oven. The ridge vent is what makes the whole assembly work.
Final passed on October 22. The solar array went back up the next day, wired and reset on the new deck. Then the homeowner added a change order for gutters in the courtyard: about 62 linear feet, two downspouts, white to match the edge metal and fascia, with a lifetime warranty on the gutter itself.
Without gutters, every rain event dumps straight down onto tile and stucco.
Roof replacement is the work we do most across Orange County, and Anaheim is a house-by-house market: ranches from the same tract era, the same two-layer history, the same solar arrays added in the last few years that now have to come off and go back on. We run the same process in Fullerton, Garden Grove, and Orange. Tear it down to wood, fix what you find, permit what needs permitting, and put back a roof the attic can breathe through.
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