Shingle Roof Replacement in Gainesville, FL, December 2024

What you are looking at

The first photo was taken from up on the roof, looking along the back slopes. Two ridgelines show in this view, and each carries a ridge vent: a low black vent strip along the peak, covered with cap shingles so only its edges show. Where one roof section meets the next, its end is finished with white rake trim, and two short black vent pipes stick up through the larger slope. On hot Florida days, that opening at the peak lets warm attic air escape, which helps limit how much heat builds up under the roof.

From the street, the shape is easier to read. The house has a long gable roof, and the right-hand part sits a step forward under its own section, so a white-trimmed gable edge rises in the middle of the front. The far end closes with a gable filled with gray vertical siding and a small louvered vent. Behind it all stand tall pines, a tree draped in Spanish moss and a few trees still holding rust and orange leaves, photographed under a flat gray sky in mid December.

Seen close, the gray shingles carry a speckled mix of light and dark granules. They are architectural shingles: a second layer bonded along the lower part of each one gives every course its own shadow line, and in bright sun those darker bands stand out against the lighter gray. The third photo centers on a black vent pipe on the back slope, with a ribbed collar where it meets the shingles. The fourth looks along one slope to its edge, with brown lawn below.

The garage, with its wide double door, sits under its own section of roof at one end of the house, closed with a gable on its outer end. A white gutter runs along that eave above a red brick pier, and branches of a large tree hang over this end of the house.

Photos Brehm took during the job show how the roof went on. Blue tarps were spread over the shrubs and along the walls before the old shingles came off. Once the deck was bare, light new plywood sheets went in among the older, darker sheets, and Brehm photographed a tape measure stretched along the nail rows on the deck and later along the cap nail rows in the underlayment. Gray synthetic underlayment went over the deck, held down with plastic cap nails, with white drip edge at the eaves. The tear-off and the finished shingles were photographed on the same day, and the street photos a few days later.

Behind the house, a screened enclosure has its own low roof of weathered ribbed panels. It sits right beside the new shingles in several of Brehm's photos, but those photos show no new work on it, so this page covers the shingle roof.