Comp Over Shake Tear-Off with Full Re-Deck and COOL Plus Re-Roof

What was actually wrong sat two layers down, and it had been wrong since the house was built.

Look at the shingle in the first photo. That is a hand pulling it away from the eave. No tools, no effort. When the mat delaminates like that, the shingle has stopped being one piece and become a stack of paper. Nailing new material into that is nailing into nothing.

We measured the roof at 3,776 square feet across three planes, 60 by 32 being the largest. Call it 38 squares. The addendum called out two layers, and the second one was the part the homeowner did not know about: under the composition shingle sat the home's original wood shake.

Wood shake has to breathe. That is why houses like this one were built on skip sheathing, 1x boards run across the rafters with a deliberate gap between every board so air could move under the shakes and dry them from below. It is not a shortcut. It is the correct way to build a shake roof.

It is also the wrong way to build every other kind of roof.

When a previous crew laid composition shingle over that shake, they did what a lot of crews did in the eighties and nineties. They went over the top. Nothing underneath changed. The gaps were still there. The house was still a shake roof wearing a comp costume, and it had been running out the clock ever since.

So we re-decked it. All of it. Half-inch OSB across the full 3,776 square feet, so every nail and every inch of underlayment has continuous wood behind it instead of a gap. We ran 180 feet of new 1x8 shiplap, replaced 40 feet of 2x10 fascia, and set 50 linear feet of starter board around the edges.

That is the work in the right-hand photo above, and it is the reason this roof will still be a roof in twenty years. It is also the part no one will ever see again.

Then it got sealed, end to end, before a shingle went down. Deck Defense synthetic underlayment across the field. WeatherLock self-sealing membrane where water concentrates and where re-roofs eventually fail. Starter Strip Plus around the full perimeter. Two-inch white edge metal, chosen to match the trim rather than the shingle, which is why the rake lines in the finished photos read as crisp instead of heavy.

So we did not wait. Empire ran the attic reset on October 3 while our crew was laying shingle overhead. You can see it in the attic photos above: blown-in fiberglass laid deep and even across the joists, with a depth ruler staked into it. That ruler is not decoration. It is how coverage gets measured instead of estimated, and it is the difference between an attic that was insulated and an attic that had insulation put in it.

Ridge vents went in under Ohagin high-profile trim. Every roof jack and cap on the house was replaced and painted to match, so the hardware disappears into the field instead of speckling a new roof with mill-finish silver.

The finish is Duration COOL Plus in Cliffside Grey, a solar-reflective shingle in a charcoal that reads nearly black under overcast and silvers out in full sun. Against sage green siding and white trim, it does the thing the old tan roof never did. It looks like somebody chose it.