drip edge underlayment

Grass Valley Gal · 10-27-2008, 11:12 PM

Can anyone tell me if the starter strip along the ridge of this roof is done right? As long as I'm asking, should the roofing paper have cuts in it like this? Thanks for looking.

johnk · 10-28-2008, 12:09 AM

What the hll goes on there?!?Looks awful and those are not starters ,they are regular shingles.The paper should not be cut either.Who did this?

Grass Valley Gal · 10-28-2008, 11:57 AM

Some hacks! I keep trying to tell my boss (who owns the house) that the guys who put this roof on did it wrong. There are cuts all over the place in the roofing paper. The roof is only about seven years old. It used to have a shake roof with wooden gutters. I worked for the Gal who bought this house (a foreclosure) fixed it up with the help of a local contractor. I won't call him a professional. He hired some so called roofers to put on a new comp roof. The roof is supposed to have insulation board on it, but I have found that every where they removed any insulation board, they replaced it with plywood. The house has open beam tongue and groove ceilings and from what I am finding it has more plywood than insulation. In some places it is missing both.

The drip edge is under the roofing paper and that is what they used for a starter strip! The house keeps developing leaks in various places around the house. I told him that the smart thing to do with this mess is to tear the whole thing off. Repair or replace any damaged wood, install new insulation board (more energy efficient) have a reputable roofing company install a new roof.

But he won't listen to me! Maybe it's because I'm a girl or because I don't have a contractors liscense. But I don't need a liscense to see that this roof was not done right. He says the comp shingles are only seven years old and they still look good. I can't argue with that, but as I have read in one of of my other posts " you can polish a turd, but it's still a turd!"

Thanks for the input! Luana

OldNBroken · 10-31-2008, 12:52 AM

Nothing wrong with the cuts in the paper.
The runs I see look decent.
Idiotic using laminates for starter up the rake though and that looks like an awful low pitch for a shingle roof anyways.

And that is not insulation board, that is 1/2" recovery board and has little R-value anyways. Shingles should not even be installed directly over that. Whoever put the rec board under there is a hack. Shingles should only be installed over a solid wood deck.

Grass Valley Gal · 10-31-2008, 01:45 AM

What is recovery board and what is it used for?

OldNBroken · 10-31-2008, 02:24 AM

It is that brown wood fiberboard underneath the felt. I believe you are calling it insulation board but it has no insulating value. It is most widely used on flat roofs as an underlayment or separation board when installing a new roof. I don't know why anyone would use it under a shingle roof at all.

Grass Valley Gal · 10-31-2008, 02:35 AM

Thanks, so if someone wanted to insulate an open beam ceiling style house, they really couldn't? Could they?

OldNBroken · 10-31-2008, 10:25 AM

anything is possible, it just takes money. This one would be no exception.

If there is no void to insulate the interior then you overframe the existing wood deck, install rigid polyiso or eps (styrofoam), THEN sheet over the top of that, then install the roofing. Don't normally do it on average houses as it is quite a costly process but do it quite often on new construction of upper end homes. The insulation alone will run around $2/sf, then add all the framing, sheeting and labor costs, including redoing all the facia to account for the 7-9" heighth of the system.