Roofing

 Date: September 4 - September 8, 2025

Standing seam roofing is dynamite stuff, even the cheaper "nail strip" (as opposed to the top dollar floating-on-clips) option. This is unquestionably the best roof I've ever had. 

 

Austin had passed on the contact for Jose, a roofing guy he'd worked with before. He came out in mid August to scope out the job. I wanted to have everything done at once - roofing, snow guard and gutters. And since I was going to have these guys out there, I expanded the scope to include a fix to the broken roof gutter on the main house and install of snow guards above it.

 

You may never have heard of snow guards --- I hadn't when we built our house. And nobody doing the construction, the roofing guys or the gutter guys mentioned them.  The first time I cottoned on to them was when my neighbor built a small shed and used a piece of angle flashing like this:

 

He explained that's what keeps a heavy snow accumulation from sliding down your metal roof as it melts. A sliding slab of snow will bend or tear off the gutter.  Of course by then the gutter on our south facing roof had been thoroughly damaged by sliding snow so rainwater just poured off the roof onto the arbor below. It's been 15 years so I thought it was high time to get that job done right!

Jose gave me a price for the whole job - no breakdowns or justification. Just "this'll be the bill." It was 25% more than an informal price I'd received from another roofer over the phone, but that informal price hadn't included anything other than the roofing itself, and that roofer wouldn't be available until November. So I took up Jose on his offer, which I typed up since he had absolutely no paperwork. This guy is reported to have 35 people working for him, and he doesn't have an office. Just works out of his truck and cell phone. Sounds sketchy but on the other hand they did a first class job. As for the warranty, we can only hope that we don't need for that cell phone number to still be good in 10 years. 

 

Jose's crew were ready to go the day we were ready for them, which I really appreciated. The roofing material was supplied by a company that specializes in that. They were using the company-provided navigation system to find our house, which evidently still had the map data telling them that they should drive all the way up the mountain and then crash down the hill on a dotted line to our house. Same story as that first cement truck. These guys didn't have a clock running though, so when they got to the top of the hill they managed to get through to Jose on the cell phone, who handed it to me, so I could figure out where they were and how they should proceed.

Success!:

Set up the feed:

 

 They asked me what metal ridge pattern I wanted --- I didn't have a clue --- I thought all standing seam was flat except for the seams. So they extruded a sample to show what they were talking about. More ridges in the metal means more strength, and it will better hide any imperfections in the surface beneath, so I opted for the ridgier option.

 

 

When they handed me that sample I was surprised at how beefy it was. You can see in my typed spec for what I was paying for I had said 26 gauge because I thought that was how this nail-strip roofing came. I guess Jose didn't bother to read what I had specified because they were supplying 24 gauge metal which is  much nicer and more expensive.

Then they went into production mode, setting the required roof length into the machine:

 It was super nice to have that clean flat cement slab to work on. 

After the roofing was all done they fed out another 30-40 feet of plain metal to be used for flashing. On departure you can see we used about a roll and a half from that trailer. Getting out from our place is a lot simpler than getting into it. You just take the downhill option at each branch of the road.

Here is the complete roofing stock, including material for flashing that the roofers will bend as needed:

Installing the back side: They carried the metal through the building then passed it through that window onto the scaffold. These roofers use safety ropes, even when the slope isn't that steep.

 I didn't capture it very well but every sheet has had the bottom edge manually bent down to form a drip edge. Getting metal onto the front side was a bit more involved:

 

After the first day they had got to the skylight location.

Next morning started early with framing the skylight curb and preparing it to receive the skylight:

View of skylight work from the hill behind:

 

Detail of the skylight flashing:

 Custom manufacture of the flashing from the plain sheet metal material. The tool (called a sheet metal brake) is struggling with the 24 gauge thickness:

 

In the time-honored metalworking tradition, rivets are used for the few places where pieces have to be joined:

 This is how standing seam is assembled. The screw heads of the previous piece is covered by snapping the next piece over them:

 The Velux skylight is 4 feet by 6 feet - the biggest one they make. The kit is super well designed and the installation process nicely documented. Here is the crowning moment, at the end of a long Friday:

 

You can see the round safety harness anchor the roofers installed at the ridge in the second panel from the left:

 

The beautiful image also shows how the edge and ridge was finished with custom metal. There was a lot of manual manipulation of the metal for this type of roof. I had done my own metal roof installation for several smaller jobs, but this standing seam is definitely not a job for the DIY type.

This photo also reflects a mistake I made in the roof spec because I didn't say I needed boots installed for the plumbing and radon vents. I thought naively that the plumber would do that. 

 That evening I was able to get my first taste of a nice garage for working on equipment:

 

The gutter guys showed up mid-day Saturday. I was really hoping for better gutters than the ones we'd had trouble with on the house, but I was chagrined to see they were exactly the same. Which supposedly is top of the line. I'll just keep my fingers crossed that the snow guards will help with their durability. 

Speaking of snow guards, since the roofers hadn't installed them, I was assuming the gutter guys would do that. However they were at a total loss when I asked them about it (and their English was OK). Editorial: it just amazes me that a business that installs gutters has no idea about snow guards. Their work isn't going to last long if its not protected! So I made a call to Jose who said the roofing guys would be back later to install the guards - he hadn't forgotten about them.

By making the gutter on-site it can be extruded as one piece with no joints. The gutters require a considerably less sophisticated extruder as it processes easy-to-bend aluminum.

 

 

 

However a 43 foot gutter isn't all that maneuverable:

The scaffold in back gets another use case:

Gutter is done but the Tyvek looks like merde: 

The guys took a look at the repair needed on the house and decided there wasn't enough daylight left to get it done. So they extruded an extra long gutter which they left in the lawn for the remainder of the weekend. Monday morning they were back to deal with it:

 

 They used my invented rigging to get access to the gutter over the glass panels on the arbor. I can tell you from personal experience that it's a bit shaky on that get-up:

 Meanwhile the roofing guys came back to install the snow guards. These were considerably higher quality than I was expecting, mounted using the same clamps as the solar panels will use:

 

 The safety anchors in use:

 

They finished up by putting a flashing snow guard over the repaired gutter on the house (like the one in the first picture above, which is understandable because it's just a standard screwed-down metal roof). They (wisely?) wanted nothing to do with my scaffold rigging which I had left up for them but just used ropes and ladders from the far side which is only 10' off the ground.