Shingle Roof Replacement in The Villages, FL, October 2024

What you are looking at

The first photo looks up the lake side of the roof under a blue sky with a few clouds. The new shingles run in long, straight courses up to a hip, with three round dome vents near the top of the slope and two small black hood vents below them. Beyond the roof edge is open water, and palms and other homes line the far shore.

These are architectural shingles, the thicker laminated kind with a layered, staggered look instead of flat, even tabs. Up close the color is a dark gray with lighter gray granules mixed in, and some pieces read a shade darker than their neighbors, which gives each slope a soft patchwork pattern in the sun.

Most of this roof is hipped, with slopes that meet at outside corners and run down to gutters. A hip is the outside corner where two slopes meet, and it is covered with folded cap shingles laid in an overlapping row. Photo two shows a capped hip crossing a broad slope, photo four looks up another hip toward the sky, and photo five looks straight down at a corner where the hip caps come down to the white gutter.

Photos Brehm took during the tear-off show the old round vents coming off with the old shingles. New round metal bases went in next, each one set in black roofing cement on the underlayment, and the black dome caps went on last. Photo three shows three of them in a row. Dome vents have no motor; they let hot attic air out through the top of the roof, which helps limit heat build-up under a Florida sun.

The clear dome in photo six is a solar tube, a small skylight that carries daylight down a reflective tube into a room below. The new shingles are cut and laid tight around its black base. Under the shingles is a gray synthetic underlayment, with a black liner run down the valleys. Brehm's job photos show the gray layer rolled out in overlapping rows over the bare deck and held down with red plastic cap nails, with white metal drip edge nailed along the eaves.

Photos Brehm took from the roof show the back lawn running down to the lake, with a few trees at the shoreline starting to turn orange in late October.