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.