A dark rich colored roof may be more appealing, but we believe making your roof look good, last long, and work right is more important than simply having a good looking roof. The analogy I like to use to help explain the harm a stain puts on your roof is the example of tanning. You have the option of using a tanning bed versus simply using the natural light of the sun. They both provide an appealing hue, but one can lead to cancer and the other provides health beneficial Vitamin D. Which would you chose?

A roof stain is simply a way to cover up the problem areas on your roof without having to repair them. To you, the homeowner, it sounds like you’re getting a smoking deal when in reality you’re paying a roofing contractor to cover up the damage. It costs you more in the long run to have your roof stained because your roof will degradate at least twice as fast.

Help your roof move forward and slow the degradation process with the all-natural non-invasive roof maintenance system of Roof Life of Oregon. To learn more about our roof maintenance call (503) 925-0125 or submit a free roof estimate form.

Today we’d like to share with you what a quality cedar roofing project looks like. The difference is pronounced and unsurpassed by our competitors.

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Hi this is Patrick Morin, Roof Life of Oregon, its February 12th today 2010, and we’re standing in front of a recently completed shake roof we completed about three or four months ago. This is a tapersawn resawn one inch shake. I wanted to talk to you about the different looks of wood as there are in architectural shingles and tiles and metal. This is an example of a wood roof that has extremely straight lines. You’ll notice how all the keyways are even and there is space so that debris can get out of there, water can traffic out of there. Notice the quality of the shake the shape edges the uniform thickness. Also our roof to wall flashing, you’ll notice we rounded the edges, we cut them into the corners of the siding so that the water can pass by, and so the water can go underneath that siding trim. As we move across looking at this home, its got a unique look, it makes the home unique in its neighborhood. You look at the valley over here that transitions into this front nook, it’s a very uniform valley, very, very, angular. It makes a difference; everything on this roof makes a difference. Here’s what’s most impressive about this roof. Not just the look, not just the quality of wood that can’t be gotten but anywhere else but Roof Life, is that it’s backed by Portland’s only lifetime workmanship warranty. This is a 50 year shake with a lifetime workmanship warranty, not found anywhere else in Portland except Roof Life of Oregon.

As previously stated, you’re not going to find a difference between the roofing materials roofing contractors use. If you want a one inch tapersawn resawn roofing material any roofing contractor can purchase it for you. The difference if going to be in the components and workmanship provided. As Portland’s only lifetime workmanship warranty provider, we challenge you to find a better quality roof than a Roof Life of Oregon roof.

Today, we’ll show you what a maintained roof with a stain looks like and explains why staining your shake roof is not a good option.

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Down here as I zoom in you’ll see some roofs that were cleaned and treated with a colorant, and the growth has come back through it, so they’re going to be in trouble because the only way to do those is to strip it down and re coat them. Every time you do that it wears out. We’re going to zoom in on another Roof Life roof, you can see it’s a light ash gray reflecting the head, resisting moisture, and allowing that shake to last a long time. I want to show you this roof next door; this is the problem with using colors on roofs, you can’t ever get the repairs to blend in. Even if you put new shakes in and you color them because they’re new they schluff the color and they end of being a permanently repaired roof. We at Roof Life stay away from staining roofs we allow them to be their natural driftwood gray, kind of a soft silver gray, and therefore you can do maintenance where the new repairs blend in giving you a uniformed healthy roof.

At Roof Life of Oregon we will never stain your roof. To learn more about how we properly maintain shake roofs please visit our roof maintenance website page.

To help you understand what a maintained or unmaintained shake roof looks like we created this two part video series. Today we look at the difference between a well maintained roof and a roof that has not been maintained at all.

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We’re on the South side of Bull Mountain, here in Tigard Washington county Oregon, and just taking a scan of about thirteen to fourteen year old shake roofs. You can see as I scan which roofs are maintained, which ones are cleaned and treated with a color, which ones are unmaintained, and which ones the client is taking care of correctly. As I come across these two roofs here, you can see they are almost identical in age and yet one roof is reflecting the heat, staying cool, resisting moisture retention, and drying out very quickly after a rainstorm. The house on the right is like a solar panel, causing a lot of heat on the wood, also when it does rain it sits on the wood for extended periods of time. Both of those factors will make the roof on the right be replaced twice as fast as the roof on the left. The roof on the left is the natural color of cedar with no growth on it, no coloring. The roof on the right is black fungus, moss, mold, and mildew that grow not only on shake roofs, but tile roofs and architectural shingle roofs.

Stop by tomorrow for part two where we show you what a maintained roof with a stain looks like and explain why staining your shake roof is not a good option.

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This is the finished product, nice and stacked, even rows distributed nicely along the roof. This is going to keep us from putting too much weight in once place on your roof. We distribute it all the way across your roof so the guys can work from either side. They can pull from either side, work down that side of the roof, or this side of the roof.

To learn more about the Roof Life of Oregon roof construction difference please visit our cedar roof page.

One of the differences between a Roof Life of Oregon roof construction and another roofing contractors is how we start our project. Daniel White, our Roof Replacement Production Manager, walks us through the process of starting a new roof construction project.

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Today we are out in West Linn and we are loading shakes on a roof. This homeowner decided they are going to go with a 7/8^th cedar treated shake. We do buy the shakes direct and have them straight shipped to our shop. Because of that we do load them ourselves; we don’t have a supplier do it. This truck is how we’re going to do that; this truck is a roof top loader truck. Let me show you how we’re going to do that. One of our guys is up on the truck, and we have our guys make sure that they have their harnesses on and they’re ready to start loading. Next thing we will do is turn on the convener. You can see that we have caution tape so that no one walks in that area under that boom. We don’t want anything falling off and hitting anyone, a home owner comes home, or anything like that we’re going to make sure we have a nice taped zone.

To learn more about our roof construction process please visit our roof replacement section on the website.

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We’re looking at erosion holes, places that need to be fixed, here’s a lead staple from the original install you want to be careful because this is in a drip line and that could be a leak on the homeowner, we look for all sorts of things we want to fix because we are only going to look at this roof once every 5 years we going to give it a 5 year no leak warranty and we are going to do the repairs and use a self cleaning 5 year preservative which will keep the growth off and allow it to shed the water and in addition to that it will be heat and light reflective. This will give you twice the service life out of this roof and it will look good the whole time, bringing the homeowner peace of mind.

Roof Life of Oregon offers Portland’s only 5 year no leak warranty. In fact out of the 10,000 clients we serve only 7 reported leak problems last year. That’s an unheard of 99.93% roof maintenance success rate. If you don’t want to worry about leaks on your cedar roof for the next five years have Roof Life of Oregon conduct one of our free roof inspections.

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What we do to fix these is we have a tool that goes underneath the shake and pops the staples and then we pull the shake out and then we take a new shake and we put it in, we put the nail at an angle here and put it about a ¼” to the head and then tap the shake up into place so that the nail that holds this new shake in is up underneath the old shake. When we determine how the repairs are we’re looking for failed flat grain, this would be an example of a shake that was cut out of inferior wood compared to these vertical grain shakes surrounding it. You can see after 12 years the flat grain has fallen apart and this is 20% of the wood in a blue label #1 shake is flat grain, 80% is vertical grain. Flat grain means it is cut out of the round, if you look at the butt ends you’ll see that it’s got a curve to it, which makes all the grain on the top as big as your finger. Vertical grain means cut out of the straight grain and all the grain runs vertically and you can see how tight they stay even on a south wall or south facing roof that stresses the wood, it does the same thing on tile and composition, the roofs wear out where all the water hits.

Do you know if your roof is starting to visibly curve? If its been a while since you were last on your roof, if ever, then you need a Roof Life of Oregon roof inspection. To read the finale of our three part series on cedar roof maintenance process stop by our blog tomorrow.

Over the next few days, Patrick D. Morin will take us through his roof inspection and analysis of a cedar roof here in Portland, OR. Today, Patrick talks about cedar roof maintenance.

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I want to talk a little bit about roof maintenance; this is a typical 12 yr old shake roof in a sub division here in Portland OR. When we get on the roofs generally as we look across this roof that it’s been cleaned and treated before, this type of growth is a re-growth, meaning that it’s been treated before but it’s been a long enough period of time that the growth is starting to come back on the roof. We are looking at the south side, the two sides that wear on a shake roof in Portland is the south and west sides, we are looking for erosion holes, this is the felt paper, this shake starts here and stops here, its 24 inches long, and the water just wears the shake out, here is another one here, here’s another one here.

If you can’t remember the last time someone walked your cedar roof, or your the new owner of a recently purchased home, it’s in your best interest to have Roof Life of Oregon come out and provide a free roof inspection. To read part two of our cedar roof maintenance process stop by our blog again on Wednesday.

Its taken us 25 years, but we did it. We have worked long and hard grow to the point that the best mills in Canada make us our very own cedar shakes. This is a huge blessing for all involved. A win-win situation. The standards are nothing short of perfect and because we skip all the middle-men, traditionally adding $30-$70 a square, we can bring you this material for a little more than all the other Portland roofing contractors offers for low grade cedar shakes. The difference to you as a homeowner is 80% less maintenance. Fewer repairs, less treatment, and a lot better looking roof profile.

In the roof maintenance world of Portland, there are many companies that try to cut corners when repairing your roof. Some roofing companies use a pre-treated green-colored cedar shake to repair a roof that has raw natural-colored cedar shakes. These repairs will never blend in and will leave your roof permanently marked. Some roofing contractors find it too time consuming to hand nail the repairs in a blind nail application and instead nail the daylights out of it with a nail gun. Another common problem is roofing contractors use a lower grade cedar shake so they can save a couple hundred dollars per roof in material costs. How about the roof contractor who only uses low grade cedar shakes that never fit the hole they were pulled from? This leaves your roof’s key ways 2-3 x’s the regulation size required for your roof to work right.

The one common theme with all of these roof contractors is they are not worried about their poor workmanship because they’re not going to answer the phone when you call with a problem. If you had a bucket with as many holes as their warranties have, it would never fill up. You only find out you been shystered when there is a leak or when you try to sell your home and the roof flunks the inspection. This happens all the time in Portland.

All of us here at Roof Life of Oregon spend 8-10 hours a day looking at roofs, it’s our life, and it’s what we do every day. We see work being done out there that if you knew it would scare you to death. Seeing what we see makes us work more diligent in developing ways to explain the differences so that as a layperson you can make an educated decision. Roof Life of Oregon is your best and safest choice in roofing and roof maintenance in Portland.