Up Top

So ... the roof. When we bought this house in 2000, we knew a new roof (and siding and gutters and windows) were going to be needed soon. The windows we put off, but during our first year we went ahead with the roof and probably made some mistakes. We went with conventional asphalt shingles, seamless gutters, and a Dutch-lap vinyl siding. All in all, it held up okay. Moss has taken root on the north side of the house and the 5-inch gutters were always too small. Plus, squirrels.

For the new roof, we're keeping most things the same, but better. We've had an issue in recent years of heavy rain overflowing the gutters and sheeting down the house. It's a hip roof, so the water flows down all four sides to the gutters. There are downspouts at each corner, but only on the north and south sides of the house; water has to turn a corner to come down to the ground (or go over the edge of the gutter). I added an additional downspout on the east side of the house, which helped some, but even when the gutters are freshly cleaned, they're too small to handle all the water from some of the storms we've been getting. Plus with all the overhanging oaks leaves, oak silks, acorns, etc., are a year-round issue.

We flirted with the idea of adding an 8-inch (or so) overhang to the house to help get the water way from the wall, but when we found out that would a few months of having formal plans drawn up and getting permits, we opted for a simpler solution that adds a new band of fascia caping around the edge of the roof and putting a new J-channel for the siding below that. This — along with 6-inch gutters, 3×4 downspouts, and a Shur Flo gutter cap system — should help channel the water flowing off the roof down to the ground.

Shingles have improved over the past two decades, too. We opted for Atlas Pinnacle Pristine architectural shingles in "heatherstone" (basically a grey with some variation in shades) with a Summit 60 synthetic underlayment under most of the roof and WeatherMaster Ice & Water 200 granular underlayment around the eaves. Supposedly the Atlas singles are designed to help reduce moss growth.

One unexpected change was the rain barrel. The RainReserve diverter we installed whenever the barrel was first installed was designed to fit a 2×3 downspout. The roofing guys planned to fit an adaptor in line to reduce the 3×4 downspout to fit the 2×3 join with the diverter, but I thought it would be better to just get a new diverter. At first, I thought we'd need to go with a different type of diverter but it turns out in 2011 the RainReserve diverters were reëngineered to work with 3×4 downspouts ... so a replacement was ordered.

Work is set to begin this week...