Restoring Old Houses: Decorative Woodwork and Roofing Redo

One of the challenges facing owners of old homes is the issue of handling repairs and upgrades while preserving the architectural integrity of their home.  Today’s new construction is performed to much lower architectural standards than in days of yore.

For instance, lets use our Arts and Crafts Style (aka Craftsman) home as an example.  Unfortunately, our home has been in need of a new roof for some time.  The original roof from 1908 was beautiful cedar shake installed on cedar slats.  Over 104 years, three other layers of shingle were added.  Another layer of cedar shake was installed along with two layers of asphalt.  The last time the roof was shingled was likely in the late 1970’s.  You can see the moss growing on the cedar shakes below.

 
One of the unique characteristics of our home (relative to new homes) is that it has crown molding adorning the fascia boards as an ornamental architectural feature.  Since the crown butts up against the roof, any roofer would have to work with it to have a nice looking finished product while maintaining the decorative ornamentation.

We called several roofers to bid the job.  One of the responses was disheartening:

“Oh, I can do that job no problem.  Let’s rip off all that ugly crown molding and just put some drip edge on there.  We can get’er done fast!”

Clearly, this roofer had no appreciation for old homes.  As I later confirmed, he mostly worked on homes built after 1960 and was only bidding my roof because he was starving at the time.  We passed on using this contractor.

Of the three bids we received for our roof, we ended up going with the highest bid.  The lowest bid was a 35 year old guy and a truck who had been roofing for 5 years.  He was nice enough but he was unfamiliar with working around the crown molding.   We ended up using Stuart Roofing which had 80 years experience as a family roofing business.  Their bid was only $2,000 higher and we felt they were by far the best value for our home.  We definitely got our money’s worth.

The tear off crews arrived around 6am one morning and had the roof torn of and dried-in after just two days.  They removed 60 yards of debris.  Amazingly, they used drop clothes around the home and didn’t leave a single nail in the grass or on our driveway.

Then it was time to pause while we dealt with our crown molding.  After searching for the right contractor for the job, we tapped Paul Martin to install new crown molding and paint our home.  We had Ellis Planing, on Wall Ave. and 26th St.,  custom mill our 4” crown out of paint-grade poplar.  Paul got to work priming, painting and installing the new crown.

After Paul installed the crown, he painted our dormers and the decorative woodwork around the home.  We asked him to leave the lower half of the front porch for us to paint as a Saturday family project.  Paul completed his work in just over a week and it was time to put the shingles on the home.

We chose a 40-year architectural asphalt shingle as we figured we didn’t want to install another roof on this home in our lifetimes.  We tossed around the idea of installing a cedar shake roof but the cost would have doubled our bid.  So, asphalt prevailed.   Three more days of work, and the project was finished.     

Here is the before and after video: