The roof is done

At long last, the roofer has finished our roof, gutters, and downspouts. Here is a brief chronology:

About one year ago, last February, we had some terrible ice dams and roof leaks. We signed the contract with the roofer in March. The roofing project began in June. The second floor roof was completed in August. Significant progress was made in September and October.

Yesterday, Friday January 18, 2019, was the epic conclusion of our 10-month-long roofing and gutter project. Yes, believe it or not, the project took exactly 300 days to complete.

Here is an outline of the final work completed yesterday:

Roof vents are required to properly vent the attic over the addition and the front of our old house (the back of the second floor is vaulted). While I had wanted aesthetically pleasing ridge vents, the builder and roofer both told me they wouldn’t be enough with our hip roof (a hip roof doesn’t have much of a ridge), so we went with these boring, ugly things, installed per the original plans.

Here, the vents are being installed on the addition. I’m not sure why they didn’t install these while they were originally installing the shingles. Seems like that would have been easier than ripping off a bunch of the shingles, cutting holes, re-doing the ice and water shield, and re-shingling.

In addition to these four vents (they had already installed the kitchen hood vent), they installed two new vents for the second floor attic.

They had also mistakenly covered our powder room bathroom fan vent. Here is the new flapper vent installed.

Next, they completed all of the copper downspouts. Here is a quick tour of the new ones they finished yesterday.

This downspout comes from the second floor and is in a tricky location. The balcony has two drains, one of which was in the way of the downspout, so they couldn’t get this one absolutely straight.

This is a tall two-story downspout.

The gutter pitch on the second floor is quite tricky, and they had to add two downspouts at this corner of the house.

Here is another view:

There is one item which may need to be revisited. A section of the first floor roof by our old kitchen doesn’t drain properly. We need to add a new downspout in that location.

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