Roofing How-To & Shingles Installation // NOT SO TINY HOUSE BUILD Part 10
Learn about roofing a house, including how to install asphalt architectural shingles on a roof step by step, in part 10 of the (Not So Tiny) House Build series!
Tools and Materials Used :
Voiceover Script :
In case you missed the last video, we got the fascia ventilation dealt with and painted the exposed rafter tail/fascia area, so next we could move on to roofing.
The first step in the roofing process was installing the drip edge, which helps to divert the water coming off of the roof into the gutters. Drip edge also laps up the roof sheathing a few inches and helps to protect that area from water as well.
The process of installing drip edge is fairly simple, with the most complicated areas being where the drip edge goes around corners or up and over the ridge.
We started the drip edge at one corner of the building, where the rake and eave edges of the roof met up. One important step here is to wrap the drip edge up onto that rake edge, so that the drip edge there would overlap it.
To do this, I made a few cuts on my piece of drip edge, first cutting away the little kick out on the bottom edge and then making a square cut the same width of the upper section of the drip edge, which I could then fold back, creating a turn which will wrap up onto the rake edge.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a good shot of my first piece of drip edge going on, but here I am installing the second row of eave drip edge, and you can see I’m tucking it up under the rake drip edge, which I hadn’t fully nailed yet.
You can see how that little bend allows the rake drip edge to overlap the eave drip edge and there are no gaps in this corner where water could work its way in.
Otherwise, if you were to just cut your eave drip edge flush with the gable end, there would be a gap here.
I attached this piece of drip edge with 1 ¼” roofing nails, making sure the nails were driven into the fascia board below. Once the first piece was on, I could continue running drip edge down the eave edge, lapping the pieces of drip edge roughly 2” where I had to start a new piece.
To lap the pieces, I just laid the next piece of drip edge on top of the previous piece, nailing both pieces in place, but Jamie from the Perkins Builder Brothers had a great tip in one of their recent videos where he showed how you can notch the seamed edge and then slip the two pieces of flashing together. This not only connects the pieces more tightly, likely preventing more water infiltration, but it also looks a lot better and I really wish I had seen that trick before installing my drip edge.
Anyway, from there I just continued on down the eave edge, installing more drip edge. Just a note here, most pieces of metal flashing like this are going to come in lengths around 10 feet, and this length is determined by the size of the metal break at the manufacturer of your flashing.
Since my local metal roofing company, which is where I got this drip edge made, has a 10 foot break, my drip edge pieces were in 10 foot lengths, so I needed five pieces on each eave edge.
Also, we were working off of our walk-board setup since the roof deck was a little frosty and, consequently, very slick, and so we also went ahead and threw up bundles of shingles as we went along, which was a lot easier than trying to walk them up a ladder later.
Finally, I repeated the same step of wrapping the drip edge at the other gable end and then we could cut a piece of rake drip edge.
I cut the bottom end of the rake drip edge to match the roof pitch, which was 4/12 in our case, and this was easy to layout with my speed square.
Once that was done, we set the drip edge in place to mark the length, and the top edge of the drip edge needed to be cut even with the peak of the roof ridge.
This end of the rake drip edge was cut square, rather than matching the roof pitch, and this will allow the front face of the next piece of drip edge to overlap this piece.
Also, we could have wrapped this piece of drip edge over the ridge using its full length, which you’d do on a larger roof, and to do this you’d make a series of cuts so the drip edge would lap onto itself. Since we knew we needed two pieces of drip edge for this rake edge anyway, we decided to break the two pieces in the center while still lapping them, and I just think this looks a little better.
Speaking of which, next I could cut the second piece of rake drip edge, which again needed to overlap the first piece. To accomplish this, I made a cut matching the roof pitch angle on the front face of the drip edge, about three inches from the end of the piece. After making that cut, I made a second cut along the corner of the drip edge, creating a flap on the top face of the drip edge which could overlap the previous piece.
Apologies for the terrible angle here, but here’s an illustration showing how my cut differed from the one I showed previously, with the red section illustrating the flap overlapping the top of the previous piece of drip edge.
Next, we could get this piece installed, and we first set the piece in place to mark where I’d need to cut the other end, which again was cut to match the roof pitch. Finally, we got the piece installed, bending that overlapping flap over the ridge, and you can see in this shot of me taping the drip edge later how the two pieces overlap.
The last thing to do here was to add a small white nail where the two pieces of drip edge overlapped on their front face, and you can see how the face of the second piece overlaps the previous piece. Since that edge was cut matching the roof pitch, it gives the illusion that the pieces were mitered together, when in reality they’re lapped.
We continued installing the rest of the drip edge on the back side of the building, along with the other gable end, and we did need to go ahead and install those soffit vents prior to installing the drip edge in that area where the back side of the building bumps out, since they would have been extremely difficult to install later.
The roof had finally deiced itself once we had all of the drip edge installed, so we could get up on the roof and get the drip edge taped. Since I used ZIP roof sheathing here, I didn’t need to install any roofing felt or other underlayment, since the WRB, or weather resistant barrier, is built right into the sheathing. Instead, I just needed to tape the seams between the drip edge and roof sheathing.
I started by taping the eave drip edge, making sure I taped under the rake drip edge. Ideally, this would have been taped prior to installing the rake drip edge but, again, it was too icy for the tape to have stuck properly and I just left off the last few nails towards the bottom ends of the rake fascia until this tape was installed.
I then nailed the ends of the rake drip edge off camera and then I could tape the rake drip edge, lapping the tape onto the eave drip edge. When installing anything on a roof, you basically want to install it like a shingle, lapping the things higher on the roof onto the things lower on the roof.
With that, the drip edge was installed and we could finally move on to shingles. For my shingles, I went with TAMKO Heritage architectural shingles in their Rustic Black color, as they most closely matched the shingles on our main house.
TAMKO was awesome enough to provide the shingles, starter strips, ridge vent, and ridge shingles for this project, so big thanks to them for their support and check out the links in the video description below to all of the various TAMKO products I used as part of this roofing project.
Anyway, what you see us doing here is making the two cuts needed to start the first five rows of shingles. This 5 cut method made the installation of these shingles go super quick, as we could easily make these cuts on the ground and then get right to installation once we were up on the roof.
Before installing the shingles, we needed to add a starter strip along the entire perimeter of the roof and we used TAMKO’s perforated starter strips here. To break the strips into their two sections, I just folded them in half along the perforated line and they were ready to install.
You can also cut your own starter strips from your regular shingles, which I’ll show in a bit, but this ends up wasting a lot of material, so it’s generally a better idea to use starter strips on a larger roofing job like this.
Before installing the starter strips, we went ahead and snapped two lines at the bottom of the roof, one for the starter strip and one for the first course of shingles. These chalk lines will help to keep these first rows running nice and straight even if the fascia or drip edge is slightly wavy.
Also, we snapped the chalk lines ½” closer to the roof edge than the actual width of the starter strip and shingles, and this ensured the shingles had a consistent ½” overhang on the eave edge, which we also matched on the rake edge.
Once our lines were snapped, I crosscut the first starter strip to offset the seam from the first course of shingles and then I could get it installed, lining it up with my chalk line for the eave overhang and just visually adding the ½” overhang on the rake.
I nailed the starter strip in place but I made a rookie mistake here and added the nails way too far from the eave edge. The whole point of these starter strips is to help the first course of shingles adhere to the roof, which will keep them from being lifted by wind, but if the starter strips are nailed way towards the back, wind will still be able to lift them.
If I had paid attention to the instructions from TAMKO, I would have seen that these should have been nailed between 1 ½” to 3” from the eave and rake edges and I did go back and add more nails to these starter strips after I figured this out later.
Anyway, I continued installing the starter strips around the rest of the roof perimeter and unfortunately ran out just before I finished. Thankfully, as I mentioned, you can make your own starter strips by cutting a standard shingle in half. This was particularly easy to do with these shingles since they have an overlapped area on the back side of the shingle which I could run my knife against.
I just cut a few pieces like this to finish off the starter strips and then I could finally get to installing the shingles themselves.
As I mentioned earlier, we had already gone ahead and cut a few sets of these initial courses while we were on the ground and now I just needed to nail those in place. Once again, I lined up the top edge of the shingle with the chalk line and flushed the rake edge with the starter strip and then I added four nails, adding one at each end, about an inch from the ends of the shingle, and then two more nails evenly spaced in the middle of the shingle. Also, these shingles had a nail line printed on them which made it super easy to nail these shingles quickly.
Next, I added the first shingle in the second course, lining up the bottom edge of this shingle with the top edge of the flaps on the previous shingle, and added more nails.
I repeated the same process for the remaining three shingles and, once those were nailed on, my first five courses of shingles were started.
Next, I could add a full shingle to each course, using the same nailing pattern, and you can see that this offset pattern keeps the seams on the shingles from landing on top of a seam in the previous course, which would be an area where water could easily work its way to the roof deck.
Also, I’ve got to give a shoutout to this battery powered roofing nailer from DEWALT, this thing worked like a champ and we didn’t have to run any air hoses up onto the roof. I only went through about three 5AH batteries on this entire roof and had maybe one jam during the entire job. This thing has also been super handy for adding all of the drip cap and head flashing to the windows and doors.
Anyway, once the second full shingle had been installed in each course, we repeated the same pattern of 5 offset shingles to start the following 5 courses and then we could continue running shingles like this until we got to the ridge.
Once we had all of the courses started, we continued adding a full shingle to each course, and we really got moving across the roof quickly at that point.
We kept chugging along until we got close to where we knew a few roof vents would need to be installed, and we moved inside to get the exact locations of these vents laid out.
The first vent to layout was for the microwave range hood, which needs to vent either vertically or directly out of the back of the unit, which wouldn’t work in this setup.
I marked the center of the microwave on the floor and used my line laser to transfer the mark onto the bottom of the roof deck, moving the laser 90 degrees between marks to get an accurate mark in both axes.
Next, I needed to layout the location of the bathroom vent, which also needs to go out the roof since it can’t be within three feet of a window by code and there is a window on this back wall in the bathroom.
I’ll be using flexible ducting to connect the bathroom fan to the vent, so the location was a little more flexible, and I decided to line up the two vents vertically since it would look better visually.
After laying out both hole locations, I drilled pilot holes from inside and then moved up onto the roof to drill larger holes using a 4” hole saw.
Once the holes were drilled, I dropped the vents in place and temporarily added some ZIP tape to waterproof them, since we were running out of time and knew we wouldn’t get to shingling those areas on this first day. We then just kept installing more shingles on the lower courses until we got to the end of the roof.
I let the shingles overhang here and, after completing the first four courses, I came back to trim the overhanging pieces flush.
Now, if you watched my shed build video from last summer, you’ll know this is a process that has frustrated the heck out of me in the past, but it turned out that I didn’t know the most important trick to cutting these shingles easily, using a hook blade.
As the name implies, these specialty utility knife blades are shaped like a hook, and this shape cuts the shingle from both the top and bottom simultaneously, making cutting a lot easier. I also used another shingle as a straight edge when cutting, and this really helped keep the cuts nice and straight.
After cutting off the excess, I used a scrap piece of shingle to burnish the edges of the cut shingles, which cleans them up and helps them look more like a factory edge.
That was as far as we got on day one and, unfortunately, I also crashed my drone while getting this shot so there won’t be any more drone shots until the very end of this video, once I got it back after sending it off to be repaired.
Anyway, it poured rain the following day but we got back to roofing the day after that, starting with getting those roof vents, along with the plumbing vent, dealt with.
First, I wanted to address the flashing job the plumbers had attempted, which was definitely decent but was still allowing a few drops of water through during heavy rain. Instead of using ZIP tape here, I decided to try out ZIP Liquid Flash, which was great not only because it can be applied when things are wet, but it’s also easy to apply around funky openings like this one, since it basically goes on like caulk.
I removed the ZIP tape, which was surprisingly tough to remove from this PVC, and then I applied a heavy bead of Liquid Flash, which I spread onto the roof sheathing and vent pipe.
With that done, I could get the next shingle installed, which needed to be notched around the vent pipe. I used my utility knife for this and just took my time so I ended up with a good fit around the pipe.
I installed another full shingle on the next course and then I needed to cut another shingle to fit around the pipe, and this time I needed to cut a hole in the middle of the shingle. I took some measurements and marked the rough location of the hole on the shingle and then cut the shingle using a utility knife, making my cuts on a scrap piece of sheathing to keep from cutting into the roof deck.
Once the shingle fit well, I got it nailed in place and then I could get the roof boot fit over the pipe.
Before test fitting the roof boot, I went ahead and chamfered the edge of the pipe, and this keeps that sharp edge from damaging the rubber on the roof boot.
The boot fit well, so I removed it to add some roofing cement, which I applied liberally around the perimeter of the underside of the boot and then I reinstalled the boot over the pipe, nailing it to the roof.
I repeated the process of notching the shingle on the following course around the roof boot and, once I had that shingle fitting well, I added another heavy bead of roofing cement around the edge of where the shingle would lap over the boot, as well as over the nail heads lower on the roof boot, to help seal them up.
Finally, I got the shingle installed, nailing it in place and pressing it into the roofing cement and I cleaned up any excess cement afterwards.
The last thing I did, which was probably overkill but I figured wouldn’t hurt, was to add a few of these roofing screws, which have a rubber washer to keep water out. I also added some more roofing cement over the screw heads off camera to further seal them up.
I repeated the same process for the other two roof vents, first notching the lower course around the vent hole and attaching those shingles,
then cutting a hole in the two shingles in the next course and attaching those shingles,
then adding roofing cement to the underside of the vents and attaching them with roofing nails,
then finally notching the last intersecting course and adding more roofing cement below that notched edge before attaching those shingles.
Once that was done, the rest of the roof was basically just rinse and repeat and we finished up the shingles on this side of the roof in no time.
Before shingling the other side of the roof, we decided to add a few more chalk lines for reference, as we did get a little off course in a few spots on the first side. I’m honestly not sure how that happened, but having these extra chalk lines for reference were a huge efficiency boost on this side of the roof, as we could just line up every few courses with our chalked lines to make sure we were staying on track.
With no vents to work around, we were able to get this side of the roof shingled in just under two hours, which was insanely fast compared to the other side.
We stopped short of the very top course on both sides of the roof so, after adding the rest of the courses on the front face of the roof, I laid out how everything would come together with the ridge shingles.
Luckily, with one more course on both sides of the roof, the ridge shingles would cover pretty much perfectly, so I got to work adding the last course to the back side of the roof.
Once that was done, I needed to trim these shingles flush with the ridge vent opening in the roof sheathing before adding the shingles on the other side of the roof and, once again, the hook knife was the perfect tool for this job, slicing through these shingles like butter.
I also sliced through that temporary ZIP tape we had added during the roof sheathing process and removed it, as this area needs to be open for ventilation.
I repeated the same process on the other side of the roof off camera, adding the last course and trimming away the excess from the ridge, and with that, we were ready to install the ridge vent.
To start the ridge vent, I first needed to install the first ridge shingle and I cut a little starter strip from another ridge shingle and got that installed before installing the first ridge shingle.
Also, I for some reason decided to go a little nail crazy and didn’t consider that I’d need these nails to be hidden, so don’t do what I did here, as I had to replace this shingle so I could hide the nail heads with the next shingle.
Anyway, after adding the first ridge shingle, I could get the ridge vent installed, and I used TAMKO’s Rapid Ridge here. This ridge vent can be installed with a nail gun and even comes with a roll of 1 ¾” coil nails for installation.
Also, I want to mention that the ventilation your ridge vent supplies needs to be balanced with your soffit ventilation, otherwise the system will not function properly, and this is why I added so many of those round soffit vents in the previous video.
There were a ton of armchair construction gurus in the comments saying I installed way too many vents, but because we have cathedral ceilings throughout this house and, consequently, the airflow won’t travel between the rafter bays, I had to install at least that many vents to properly balance the NFA, or net free area, provided by each of the ventilation sources in each rafter bay.
Anyway, I got one section of the RapidRidge nailed on and then I needed to lap the next length. To do this, I needed to peel back the fabric along the edge of the material and cut away the plastic in that area, then I could overlap the fabric on the previous material and nail it in place.
I repeated the process of installing the ridge vent along the rest of the roof and ended it the same way I started it, butting it into a ridge shingle.
With that done, we could finish off the roof by installing the ridge shingles, and, before starting, we needed to make sure the shingles were oriented away from the prevailing winds in this area, as this long term exposure to high winds can loosen the shingles over time.
Since the ridge is oriented in the same direction as the roof on our main house, I just matched the orientation, but you can find a graph of the prevailing winds in your area online if you don’t have a reference.
Anyway, with that figured out, I could start laying the ridge shingles, and these needed to be overlapped with a little more 5” showing, basically enough to cover the nails. Also, we did snap a chalk line for reference but it was nearly impossible to see, since it was black chalk on black shingles.
We just continued working our way down the roof until I got to the other end, where I added the last shingle with two more nails and added roofing cement to seal the nails.
With that, besides a little cleanup, the roof was officially done!