Roofing Work

Every now and then we do work that's a little out of the ordinary for us, and the small roofing job this week was no exception. The client had a leaking sunroom roof, and the entirety of the problem was due to a relatively horrible sunroom design (the sunroom predated the clients purchasing the house many years ago). Long story short, there was absolutely zero flashing between the sunroom roof and the exterior wall of the house the sunroom butted up to. The only thing the sunroom installers did to keep the rain water that ran down the house's aluminum siding from going into the sunroom was...caulk. Gobs...giant, crazy fat beads of caulk.

Caulk is meant to seal up hairline cracks; anything larger than that and caulk by itself is a totally improper use of the stuff. Granted, if you look at the labeling on tubes of caulk - doesn't matter which kind, whether it's cheapo painter's caulk or high-end silicone - most of them will advertise that their product will work on cracks up to 1/2", 3/4" or even 1" thick, which is absurd. Caulk dries out, it shrinks, and especially with exterior applications, it deteriorates over time. To attempt to "seal" an addition's roof to the house by way of caulk and caulk alone, especially in the absence of any flashing...that's cutting corners. The adage that there are always 3 options: good, fast and cheap but you can only have 2 of the 3 was fairly appropriate in this instance; caulk was a cheap and fast installation solution, but it certainly wasn't a good one.

Long story short, we put a roof on top of a roof. By adding OSB sheathing and asphalt shingles that came close to matching the shingles on the rest of the house, we were able to also slide step flashing in behind the house's aluminum siding and into the new shingles, providing a rock solid means of diverting water from the wall of the main house onto the sunroom roof...not through it as had been happening previously.  

The job wasn't without challenges. The ridge beam was beyond rotten, undoubtedly due to poor roof design and years upon years of water infiltration. Securely attaching 1/2" OSB sheathing to an existing paper thin aluminum (and styrofoam!) roof wasn't easy. Having to cleanly and accurately cut roughly 40 linear feet of aluminum siding, as well as cutting 40 linear feet of step flashing, and then gently pry the aluminum siding away from the house in order to slide the step flashing in behind it...only cutting myself 1 time was a mild success.