Flat Roof Replacement - Days 8 & 9 (The End Is Near)

We're feeling pretty good around our MCM flat roof abode. We are officially dry, no roof leaks, and thus can proceed on interior work we have ever so patiently been waiting to get moving along. The process and timeline of our roof replacement project has mandated this patience so we can do it right. This first photo shows the original red colored fascia in its entirety, color change is good.





Digging into this area revealed our time capsule from a year ago, the previous patchjob repair we did when we initially discovered roof leaks. The newer plywood from the patch job was already saturated. Some roof joists were previously replaced around the chimney along with a couple of the 2x purlins.







At the corner of the roof a close up shot of the existing wood deterioration found during the existing roof removal. The 1x material around the outside is our redwood fascia. Not much was keeping water from getting behind it.









At the chimney a close up of the new framing and a small wrap around that the roof does at the chimney. While it looks cool from the ground this roof detail has suffered a lot of water passing through to the chimney below and the interior of our future studio space. Problem solved.








The last of the new plywood installation is almost complete in this photo. No more wet substrate is left on the house. Milestones are good at this point, I'll be observing many of them.









Later, the tapered insulation is going down. This area is the most complex in terms of crickets and drainage. As Day 8 neared an end, all that was left for this day was to throw a sheet of rubber over this area and figure the rest of the tapered out on Day 9.








That evening I was able to walk around the roof with no roofers staring me down. At this point all my photography is not exactly smiled upon. Of course this is of no detriment to bring to you the process of replacing our entire flat roof. Nonetheless this photo is great in showing the huge mess of materials, etc, just piled about. The temporary rubber overnight install can be seen to the lower right weighted down by buckets of adhesive.




The roof only has four downspouts to drain the entire roof. The roofers custom fabricated new stainless steel 'boots'. One of which is in my hand to the left. This boot is mechanically fastened to the framing with the rubber adhered to the wide pan, and the downspout to where my hand is holding it. In our case these boots drain through the roof to the downspouts. We had issues with our old boots leaking onto the soffit at one drain.

Day 9 I was able to only catch the end of the day. The tapered was figured out, origami training must be a prerequisite to install tapered insulation. Here the roofers are getting prepared to lay down a large sheet of EPDM. The glue is applied to both the rubber membrane and tapered insulation. After air drying the glue when joined forms its bond.






At the valleys of the crickets there is a reinforcement strip installed for additional support to any potential punctures. When the roof was removed several gouges were found from tree branch impacts. The large oak tree next door should be good for awhile since we trimmed it back.







The final rubber installation before us. You can make out the tapered insulation layout in a star shaped pattern. While complex the final result looks quite simple and clean. I'm proud to say the water test in this area showed great drainage with very little puddling.








And yet another milestone, the EDPM rubber installtion is complete as of 9 days of work. The new umbrella is fully extended and ready for storms. To this point 9 working days have been spread out a little over a month. The next steps towards completion involve mostly trimwork and rubber details. We'll take a look at those in the next roof post.

Flat Roof Replacement - Day 6 & 7

Since I'm a bit behind in Roof Replacement Posts, I'm going to start consolidating. We'll take a look at and review Day 6 & 7 in this post. I'm measuring by days for reference and to illustrate how many working days it takes to this huge project. To the left, Day 6 began with redoing Day 3's hiccups with additional layers of tapered insulation. It was nice to see the roofers using levels this go round.

Why did the roof still pond after a new install you might ask? Simply, the roofers weren't leveling their installation to confirm postive slope to the drain. The existing structure of our house surely has settled and moved a bit since 1953. It had become apparent leveling the plywood would be critical on the varying existing wood structure. With a level horizontal surface the tapered insulation is able to do its job in providing positive slope to the drains. Day 6's completion tied in nicely to Day 5's tapered.

Here's another view of the north wing of the roof. There's a large diamond shaped cricket that does the heavy draining on this area. Water tests showed Day 6's remediation to drain well.

Day 7 kicked off with sweltering heat and more tear off. By now the same old same old stuff. Remove existing 4 layers of roof, insulate the roof cavity, then glue and screw 3/4" T&G plywood to the roof rafters and so on with the rest of the tapered and rubber membrane. If you look close to the photo on the left you can see the use of shims to assist the plywood leveling.

A close up of the roofer leveling with shims. I'm very glad I insisted they use levels. Had I not been supervising the roof progress, we would have ended up with another pond to fish in on our roof. I don't think many flat roof homeowners would climb the ladder to inspect progress and geek out on a roof install. I call it necessary, that's just me.

I can't resist the awe of what we had for an existing roof, layers of nasty wetness. With the roof almost completely insulated we are noticing our AC in more productive to cool these hot summer days inside.

This is not the time capsule I had hoped to find in our house. This area had the worst ponding on the house, thus the most juicy. Note in this close up the deterioration of the original plywood as it's sunk into the purlin spacing. The purlins had plenty of rot and many needed replaced throughout this area. Don't you want to just take a bite of this pie?





Day 7 complete, it was time for a water test. The results to the left after a couple of hours, a unsatisfying long puddle along the cricket which is supposed to have positive slope to the drain. Here's the educational part of the show. Basically after a good rain (per code) a flat roof is expected to have no water on it within 48 hours of typical weather. This allows enough time for any puddles to evaporate. While the water in this photo does evaporate in the given time, I can't help but be frustrated with the lack of care the roofers could have taken to level the plywood.

I'll digress with my frustration of roof puddles and look at another dilemma, our now revealed original fascia. To start, this was the original color of the house. Now we knew Gene had Gened up this house in every way he could. His installation of beige aluminum over the fascia had to be for a reason. Although the original color was good to see, it's going to be some work to remove and repair a majority of the redwood around the roof.

Here you can see the rotting / deterioration / lack of maintenance up close. This is the inside corner on our porch. Our fascia is composed of a 1x8 upper band and 1x10 lower band. Almost all of it is going to have to come down. While we plan to reuse this redwood, new redwood is not cheap. At least the beige is gone.

Flat Roof Replacement - Day 5

Things have been busy, thus posts on the roof progress are a bit delayed, no worries, Day 5 is here. Today I was able to catch photos of different phases of the demolition and installation of the tapered installation. To the left is the original built up tar and gravel roof. This is some nasty stuff, while the roofers have been very clean with their demolition, we still are in clean up finding lots of little black gravel around the yard.

Here's a closeup of the vent stack and it's original flashing. The original plywood is still in place in these first two photos.

Later at lunch plenty of progress was being made. Having erred on Day 3's work and subsequent ponding, we made a change to the flat area tapered insulation slope. We opted under the roofer's suggestion to go from 1/8" per foot to 1/4" per foot. Additionally the 'crickets' are being switched from 1/4" per foot to 1/2" per foot. With so much variation at the top of the existing roof joists, shimming and framing as necessary to level the initial installation of the plywood will be imperative.

Another view to put it in perspective. After installing the new tapered thicknesses at this area, the work from Day 3 will be redone next to tie into today's work. All in all there, the existing roof joists and purlins are in pretty good shape this area.

Today I managed to catch the tapered insulation installation, something that has since become very educational. Basically there are underlying planes of the 1/4" tapered insulation. Then crickets tapered at 1/2" are then installed on top of the initial 1/4" per foot slope. A cricket is an elongated ridge that diverts the water to the drains. None of the crickets have been installed in the photo to the left.

Here's a romantic shot of the finish install. The wrinkled in the top center of the photo are temporary. You can see the valleys running diagonally along the large cricket shaped like a diamond. The roofers seal every day's work before leaving in case we get rain between work. With the way the roof has weather has been we've averaged about 2 days of work so far. Craving more? Check out CincinnatiModernation's facebook page for more photos.

Mid Century Modern Curb Appeal - Red Roof

And on the 9th day of roof work, we have the first reveal of our original house color, the color often used by Dombar, maroon/ red, similar to Wright's preference of Cherokee Red. While the roof membrane is now completely installed I have about 5 days of work to catch up to which will be featured in the next couple of posts. For now we're enjoying the lack of beige on the front of the house. We have some major work to do on the existing redwood fascia, more to come soon.

Flat Roof Replacement - Day 4

Day 4 started with a light approach to finish off the sloped area of the roof while strategizing a better approach to the flat roof areas. Given the weather has been in the 90's lately, I certainly have empathy for how hot it must be to work on a black roof all day. With Day 3's work closing on a bad note, we used this time to reconcile a new approach to negate the ponding over the new installation.

Although much of this work is the same as Day 1 & Day 2, I think it helps to document the process day by day to get a sense of the amount of work and time it's going to take to finish this roof. Again, up comes the existing 4 layers of roof, down goes the batt insulation, followed by the 3/4" T&G plywood and the new roof.

At the transition to the flat area that has major existing ponding issues, we discovered that portions of it actually have 2 layers of built-up roofing, originally we thought there was just one. The sexy photo to the left gives some perspective on just how many layers builds up to about 2-3" of material to be removed. My roof thanks me every day we have work done.

After the final install, we got some soaking rains. It's a good thing they seal each days work off, the small puddles along the transition between the new and old roofs is a result of the level change. Removing the existing roof could almost be considered excavation. Day 5 & Day 6's work are complete, so I need to catch up on posts to catch you up to where we're at. In the meantime, be sure to check out CincinnatiModernation's facebook page for more photos, Day 5 going up shortly.

Flat Roof Replacement - Day 3: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Day 3 of the roof replacement started very wet, with storms having dumped a ton of water and a lot of ponding to sweep off. The goal for day 3 was to work on half of the north side of the roof, or what you see to the right. This area is entirely over our kitchen.







I was fortunate to be home for a bit in the morning to catch some of the initial tear off. Pulling up the existing membrane reveals the anticipated moistness underneath. You can see the juicy fiberboard for the most part. The cutout beyond is the drain. The original built up roof can be seen exposed beyond. When you step on the exposed fiberboard, water literally squeezes out.

This was the scene upon getting home from work later on Day 3. Seeing as this was the first area to receive 'tapered' insulation, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. About half the roof has new installation and membrane on it at this point.

Here's a better shot that shows the angular valleys that run to the new downspout boot. We had stainless steel boots custom fabricated for our four downspouts. Basically a layer of 1/8" per 1'-0" tapered underlies the area. Then 'crickets' or mini pitched roofs as I like to call them slope to the valleys at 1/4" per 1'-0". The valleys, in theory slope about 1/8" per 1'-0" because of the underlying tapered insulation. This insulation carries about R-5 per inch of thickness. In areas we will have several inches, add this to the R-19 batt and existing construction. We are making leaps and bounds in R value.

Here's a close up of the new stainless drain. As you can see, the drain has a lap joint to seal the EPDM roof to the stainless. Another layer of lap seal will go down before all is said and done. The new downspout boots are extra long to provide plenty of purchase space for the downspouts to overlap.

Although it looks kinda nasty, here's the new condition where our flat roof wraps around the sloped roof. Beyond our large windows can be seen. The painter will paint over the visible clutter when the painting is done following the roof. All in all a much better installation than before.

Over at the chimney, the inital new termination installation started. This is a critical spot to ensure no water can leak down the chimney. We had a bit of water damage in our studio at the other end of the chimney where water had rotted away the roof joists and the plaster below.

The bad, here's a shot at the existing fascia. It's in pretty rough shape in spots, you can see here the corner isn't exactly aligning. I'll be grabbing a few pieces of redwood to let the roofers replace as needed. Hopefully this will scrape and clean up nicely. A coat of paint can do wonders.

More bad, here's the mostly concealed from street view of the sloped roof fascia. With the rotted piece laying on the roof, this is where I'm thinking some replacement is in order. One nice thing is the flat EPDM roof area extends up and is tucked behind the upper fascia board.

The ugly. Well, there's not much optimism in this photo. After taking a good look at the dry install, my eyes seemed to be fooling me, so I grabbed my 4' level and immediately realized something wasn't right with the tapered insulation slope. After bringing the hose up onto the roof and letting loose, it's easy to see what's not working. Ponding is exactly what we don't want. Ponding leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to me wishing I had a pitched roof. That said I think since this photo was taken we have worked out a solution with the roof company and will be able to report more soon. Be sure to stay even more caught up with photos on CincinnatiModernation's facebook page, be sure to 'like' it.