It’s been an insane week (when is it not?). My work started picking up pace, which means high intensity bench work with lots of trouble shooting. I am also giving a big presentation in a week, which brings lots of stress. On top of all these, we are coming down the home stretch of getting our house ready for winter. Last week, we replaced our 20 year old roof! Even though we hired professionals, we were still up on the roof and involved in the whole installation process. We worked a lot and learned a ton. Cannot wait to tell you all about it!
A couple weeks ago it rained. And it was the first real rain after we moved into this house that is not just drizzling, and our roof leaked! I came into the kitchen and saw a puddle of water under our kitchen vent. Luckily we had a wok on the stove so all the rain water was collected in the wok, but watching water coming down from our vent seriously gave me a heart attack thinking about what could be happening in the attic. At that time we have already booked our roof replacement. So You can imagine how excited I was watching our roofer’s trunk pulling in our driveway last Monday morning!
The first step of our roofing process actually started in July, when we called our roofer to book a roof replacement. Our roofer helped us with roof inspection back in May, and left us a few quotes which we think are reasonable. When we contacted him about the replacement in July, he recommended a few materials of the roof suitable for the region, and told us that we had to settle on our roof/gutter materials and color by mid-August.
We immediately started researching online. Ideally, we would like to have a tiled roof. We both grew up with tiled roofs and really like the look. Tiled roof is also easy to replace, and great for attic ventilation. Especially after visiting Poland in 2015, we have added the red tiled roof into our dream house “must-have” list:
However, we quickly learned that getting tile roof in CO costs twice as expensive as regular shingles. It is interesting to see how popularity influences the price – both in Poland and in China, tiles are preferred material for roofs and they are not any more expensive that regular shingles. But in US, fewer people use tile and they are much more expensive to purchase, install, and replace. Another example I can give you is water heater – in China, residential water heaters are largely solar powered and tankless, and in Poland water heaters are usually tankless as well. So water heaters with tank are actually much more expensive in Poland, whereas the exact opposite happens here.
Sadly, our tile roof dream was nipped in the bud for the unreasonable price. But we still craved a color that is authentic and with red undertones. We started researching shingles with three criteria in mind:
- Impact resistance – Denver has hail in Springs. Not only impact resistant shingles last longer, they are also recognized by home insurance companies with deeper discount.
- 3D looking so it does not look too flat.
- Red undertones and in dark color.
With these criteria in mind, we quickly located our shingle: Certainteed Landmark in Burnt Sienna.
It has the highest impact resistance among 3D shingles and granted us 20% less on our home owner insurance. It has life time warranty and our roofer offers 20 years of installation warranty on it. And most importantly, it offers the color we love:
This house has an exterior color that is similar to ours, so we knew that the Burnt Sienna shingle will work with our ranch:
And here is a ranch house with Burnt Sienna shingles:
See the dark brown-grey-ish color this house used on its siding? We actually used a similar color on our front door, just a shade of darker:
We adore this color a lot and it worked really well with our yellow brick. This last picture ensured us that the roof will likely go well with the color of our front door, which is a true bronze. So we quickly settled on using bronze as our gutter color as well:
Our current trim is a muddy orange, which we could not wait to replace. We learned that there would be a day between the old gutter being removed and the new ones being installed, which offers a perfect timing for painting the trims. So before our roof job began, we got bronze exterior paint from Lowe’s:
We were even more hyped up when our roofer dropped off a bunch of materials on Sunday:
And taped our permit on the front window:
Let the roof project start!
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