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.

The roof on the left is a Roof Life of Oregon roof that was treated about one year ago. Our pH changing self-cleaning treatment takes time to schluff off the yukies and nasties. When the sun comes out, you can spot a Roof Life of Oregon roof from several blocks away. The sheen is white that helps beam a healthy natural looking cedar shake roof. We’re a Portland roof maintenance company that takes our craft very seriously.

The roof on the right is a roof that was put on by another Portland roofing contractor. To get the red-like hue, the contractor used a chemical called Copper Napthenate. Unfortunately for this homeowner, their roof will degradate at least 2x faster than a Roof Life of Oregon roof. Homeowners that realize this, or simply call us to perform roof maintenance, run into a major problem. The only way we can repair and treat a stained roof is to powerwash the stain off.

If your shake roof is looking red, black, or dark gray it’s time to give us a call or fill out our free inspection form. Now is the best time to have your roof treated and by next summer, because our treatment is rain activated, you’ll have a white beam projecting from your cedar shake roof too.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SCRIPT

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SCRIPT

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SCRIPT

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.

When you choose Cedar Shakes for your home, you’re using the lowest carbon footprint roofing material in the world. Its entire life the tree gave off oxygen while absorbing carbon dioxide. When it became old and inefficient at converting, it falls over and then begins to support a lot of other ecology.

When you compare the amount of energy it takes to mill a shake as opposed to manufacturing composition shingles. This makes a huge carbon foot print and doesn’t stop at the manufacturing either, because most homeowners choose dark tones for their composition shingles the solar refection generates a ton of heat, causing the homeowner to spend money cooling the house.

Sometimes it’s difficult to detect downed trees after 50 years, but as you can see, once unburied and cut into bolts, and milled into roofing material, a 600 yr old cedar tree produces enough high quality old growth, 100% vertical grain shakes for 3-4 homes. These are Roof Life’s of Oregon shakes. These are what you want on your roof. Not only are the shakes of the highest quality but then we have them pre-treated with a wood preservative, and because the treatment is fixed into the wood, the mill then gives you a 50yr. warranty. The final step of bring you this amazing roof is to install them with complimentary components that will last just as long; i.e. stainless steel fasteners, Feltex Underlayment( 50X’s stronger than 30lbs felt normally used for shakes), correct ventilation and a pretreated starter course. This is the best roof offered in Portland from every angle.

It is a well-guarded secret in the roofing world that 98% of all premature roof failures are due to workmanship issues. In the cedar roofing industry it’s a little different in that your roofing contractor cannot only install your roof with poor craftsmanship but also buy crappy, low grade, poorly milled pretreated or raw shakes. No matter how well a shake is treated, it will never last as long as the high end shakes that Roof Life of Oregon offers.

If you’re a homeowner, who currently has a builder grade shake roof, and are sick and tired of taking care of it but you like how good a cedar roof makes your house look and you like the low environmental impact. We have the roof for you. There are a lot of examples of our work all over town and yes, this type and kind of roof will cost more to install. As we looked at the long term costs of roofing in Portland, our high end pretreated roofs will actually save you 30-40% in the next 30 years. And our Lifetime Transferable Warranty will bring you that savings even when you ready to sell. We will explain all the details when we meet with you. We look forward to serving you soon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SCRIPT

You see we have our harnesses on, it’s a nice shallow roof, but we want to make sure we’re safe on every single roof. So as they load the shingles on the guys can grab them directly and hand them off to each other. These are called jacks. They stack them so that we can make sure that the weight is distributed evenly throughout your job site. As we go we’ll be able to stack it all these 2 by 6 jacks and down the next set there and distribute it evenly across the entire roof that makes it easy for the guys. A lot of distributors as they load the roofs, they load it before it’s torn off, by having this truck ourselves and loading it ourselves we can have the entire roof torn up and deliver it to the roof when we want we don’t have to go in a specific schedule it’s all ours.

The Roof Life of Oregon difference is in our process. To learn more about our cedar roof construction visit the section on our website.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SCRIPT

There’s not much you can do about this. You just have to put your home together, as far as the roof goes, knowing that you have this type of environment. Keep the roof blown off, keep it treated. You’re going to enjoy the trees, you’re going to enjoy the shade, all the benefits beautiful environment, but it’s going to be hard on the roof. That’s what Roof Life’s good at, in particular your roof, and keeping the things looking good and working right.

Don’t let your roof breed this strain of carnivorous moss. By having Roof Life of Oregon inspect your roof every five years you can prevent this problem from ever happening.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SCRIPT

Patrick Morin, Roof Life of Oregon, March 31st 2010. We’re on a roof that’s about 15 to 18 years old under a super heavy canopy of maple trees, elm trees, some 200 foot fir trees, and this roof gets buried in debris. The homeowner is constantly blowing it off. When we’re talking about different types of moss that tends to grow, most of you have architectural asphalt shingles and you get the rows and rows of the rolly polly type moss. There’s also a second type of moss that grows on these shake roofs especially in this environment. It almost has a root system, in fact it does, as I scrape it off you can hear the roots breaking. It’s actually growing in the wood. This is actively growing because it’s eating the wood and using it as a food source.

It’s incredible to think that your cedar or shake roof can produce wood eating moss as a result of your environment. If you live in a shaded area with large trees and have a cedar or shake roof you need to have your roof inspected every five years to prevent a problem like this from happening.