Roofing in Crete

An older town

Crete predates most of what surrounds Lincoln, and its housing shows it. There are houses here from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the rooflines of the period: steep pitches, cross gables, dormers, turrets in a few cases, porches with their own roofs tying back in at awkward angles.

Those roofs are attractive and they are expensive to work on. Every intersection is labor and a potential leak, and the pitch itself changes the whole economics of the job because the crew cannot simply walk around on it.

Anybody quoting an older Crete house by square footage alone has not looked at it properly.

What is under the shingles

Two things turn up regularly on a house of this age and both belong in the quote rather than in a phone call halfway through.

Board decking is the first. Roofs were sheathed with boards laid with gaps for a very long time, and it is what is up there on a lot of these houses. It works, but it interacts differently with modern fasteners, and after a century the boards around valleys, chimneys and the eave line are often soft where water has been finding its way in for years.

Layers are the second. Covering over rather than tearing off was normal practice for decades, and two or three layers is common. That changes tear off time, disposal weight, and sometimes the structural question of what the framing is carrying. At three layers the answer is a full tear off.

Insist that the quote states how many layers it assumes and what a replacement board or sheet costs fitted. Those two lines prevent most disputes on an old house.

Rental property and the college

There is a significant rental population here around the college, and rental roofs everywhere share the same pattern: reactive maintenance, small failures left until they are large ones.

The economics of that are worse than they look. A cracked vent boot is a cheap part. The same boot left for three winters takes the decking around it, and now it is a structural repair rather than a component swap. If you own rentals here, an inspection cycle on the small parts costs less over ten years than the repairs it prevents.

Winter here

Crete gets the same freeze thaw cycling as the rest of the area, and the older housing is exactly the shape that dams badly: steep roofs with deep overhangs, partly finished attic space, knee walls, and insulation added in patches over a century.

The cause is still heat escaping and the cure is still air sealing before insulation before ventilation. On a complicated older roof the ice barrier at the eaves matters more than usual, because there are more valleys for water to collect in. The sequence is set out on the ice dam page.