This episode is part two of a three-part series: “Re-Roofing With Daniel” in which he addresses some of the most common questions encountered when it comes to replacing your roof.

RoofLifeB016-132 Podcast Transcription:

Shayla: Welcome to the Roof Life of Oregon podcast. I’m talking today with Daniel who is a roof specialist at Roof Life. And, Daniel, we are entering Part 2 of Re-Roofing with Daniel and I want to know about metal flashings. What do you think about re-using them when we re-roof?

Daniel: We recommend completely replacing them and there’s a few different reasons. Now let’s talk about metal flashings to begin with. A lot of homeowners don’t know what that is. So your roofing can’t do everything, the product. You have transitions where the walls come down, they meet the roof, chimneys, valleys that come together. There’s many different places that a flashing goes. All the flashing is a piece of transition metal. It allows you to connect the two and waterproof the area. So let’s talk about step flashing. This is a common thing that roofers don’t replace.
When your roof was put on years ago, codes were different. So the siding, we’ve seen it time and time again, the siding goes down and touches the top of the roof, not okay. Hearty plank and the other cement fibers have come out and they’ve said, listen, the right thing to do is to get that siding up off the deck of the roof, get it up two inches. That’s what they want.

Your old metal flashing that goes from behind the siding to the top of the roof is called a tin shingle. The old style, they fold it in half, so at five inches, you can see how much you have actually going up the wall. You have two and a half inches. Your siding needs to be cut up 2 inches. So you literally have a half an inch of protection up your wall. Modern codes, because of that, we now use an 8×8 tin shingle. So now you can see how much larger it is. So now we have four inches up the wall. We have two inches up from the siding, two inches behind the siding. It’s much better. Don’t let your re-roofer re-use these flashings. They need to be changed.

Other codes have changed. When it was put together, it was 28-gauge metal. It’s 26-gauge metal. I know it sounds funny, but the smaller the number, the thicker the nub. The codes have changed because they want it to last longer. So not only are we doing it for the water integrity, we’re doing it for the strength of the metal. So we’re replacing it all, from the siding to the front, from the valleys.

Chimneys, that’s a big deal. A lot of roofers, there’s two parts to the flashing on a chimney. There’s the flashing that goes from the roof up behind and then there’s the flashing that comes out of the brick, you’ve seen that mortared into the brick, and it folds over the top. That’s because your chimney and your house, believe it or not, move independently of each other. They expand and contract at different rates. So that flashing has to be able to move around. Most roofing contractors take this old counter flashing, that’s the top, they bend it up, they take it all out. If they replace this metal, they put it back in, then they bend the old flashing back down. It’s old. It’s rusted. It never does lay flat again. You can’t make it look pretty. We don’t do that. We grind it out of the chimney, get it completely out of there, brand new metal, put in, folded down, nice and clean, and re-mortared back in. It’s the right way to do your roof. It’s not going to be the short cut way, it’s going to be the correct way. That’s why a lot of contractors are cheaper, because they try to reuse as much as they can and flashing is a big part of that.

Shayla: If you have any questions about flashings, you can reach out to Daniel and the team at Roof Life of Oregon. They are always willing to answer any of those questions for you. Thanks, Daniel.