Extreme Metal Roofing

Lucky Kavalaukus, age 89, is sitting on the front deck of his Highland Lake cottage telling me that our cottage on Carr Island in New Hampshire, which he looks at every day, does not have a new metal roof on it. I have to show him pictures to prove that it does.  

The classy two-tone patina top on our cottage, which arrived on a retired party boat with the roofer, does not fit many people’s expectations about what a metal roof is. Things have changed.

I had just been up on the roof taking photographs to illustrate this article about metal roofs for Extreme How-To. Roofers do have a different perspective on things. From my perch I scanned the sky for the eagles that the builders had seen, and watched the loons bobbing in the boat channel.   

New roof, new porch pitch. The older part of the Carr Island Camp-to-cottage remodeling project features a two-tone patina roof on the existing pitch and a standing seam treatment on the new, flatter surfaces of the porch. 

Our Carr Island camp was built as a hunting and fishing lodge around 1860, and very little had changed except that a series of leaky asphalt roofs had begun a kind of morphing process that over time demanded selective tear-downs and rebuilds and some pretty funny comments in the guest log. The area around the chimney and over the main bedroom especially was susceptible to wet nights. We repeatedly lugged contractor bags stuffed with nasty, sharp-edged shingles to the town dump.

Just finding roofers to come over by boat to repair the island cottage roof was so problematic that one year I drove my own roofers from upstate New York to New Hampshire to take care of it. For two days I cooked inside the cabin while the man and his son scrambled around a very steep pitched roof. Talk about a stimulus package. This team spent much of their earnings on New Hampshire’s legal fireworks.    

Modern metal roofs are made to look like slate in this instance. Profiles come in different thicknesses and lots of different colors.

Lots of folks like metal roofs because often they can be installed over an existing roof, which eliminates the need to add wasted asphalt shingles to the country’s landfills. In New Hampshire, however, you can only cover one layer of pre-existing roof. You definitely need to look into the building code before you begin.  

While I came to understand what good stewardship of land and materials meant later in life, I have no idea where those shingles went, but I have to assume they are percolating in some sanitary landfill. And yes, I do feel bad about all of those layers of leaking roofs. But my sister Bonnie lives in green-friendly California so she feels even worse.

A series of interlocking clips makes installing aluminum panels fairly easy because they’re lightweight and fit together well.

One of our trusty resources for this new project was Green Remodeling (Changing the World One Room at a Time), a book by David Johnson and Kim Master. Johnson and Master wrote that the type of roofing we use has serious consequences on our health and the environment: “Sloped roofing materials, such as asphalt-based rolled roofing and shingles, will offgas toxins when heated by the sun. Flat roofing materials, such as tar and gravel, will also continually offgas when heated by the sun, emitting known carcinogens such as VOCs from asphalt, including benzene, polynuclear aromatics, toluene and xylene.”  

The authors say that 78 percent of the total roofing dollars spent in the U.S. is spent on re-roofing, potentially exposing homeowners to high levels of toxic fumes every time a roof is replaced or repaired.  

Roof Aqua Guard is one of several products favored by professional roofers.

Those and other ambitions for our renovation of the old hunting cabin helped us choose a “greener” metal roof made largely from recycled materials. As one expert said, your roof should last as long as your mortgage, and the product we chose had a 40-year transferable warranty (from the point of installation). Metal is also the preferred material in rainwater catchment systems—a growing area of interest in regions in the U.S. where water conservation is a serious issue. For example, in some instances, homeowners are not allowed to use water from their roofs, even to water their gardens.         

DIY and the Internet

There are a lot of ways to approach a DIY project—really do it yourself hands-on, or pay somebody else to do it according to whatever research you’ve done. In both instances, hitting the hammer or the keyboard, things get done to a higher level of expectation.  

This is the way standing-seam panels are installed. The pitch of a roof determines the best product to use–shingles or standing seam.

For us, DIY meant carefully sleuthing the Internet and not just taking a manufacturer’s claims at face value. Many parts of our project sprang from the Internet, ranging from selecting handmade drawer pulls for the kitchen to looking at local architects’ portfolios (we chose Charles Michal of Weller & Michal in Keene).  

Michal had spec’d our designs for a roof of asphalt shingle, so he wasn’t thrilled when we told him our research had led us to metal roofing as today’s green solution to roofs. It’s hard to say what our builder, Peter LaRoche of Peterborough, thought about metal roofs. LaRoche’s eyeball rolling was something we looked for in any case. The words “metal roof” had his eyeballs rocketing.  

The standing seam on the flat, new porch surfaces goes down quickly. The roofers also have a fine view of Highland Lake.

My sister Bonnie is a born cyber sleuth and an exemplary consumer—the kind that keeps all the receipts and quickly replies with warranty cards, sometimes the next day. She says one misconception about shopping the Internet is that cyber space is not necessarily cheaper. For example, while doing extensive research for lighting designs for the entire cottage, she found the exact same products at a better price “offline” at a trendy interiors store in her own Los Angeles beach neighborhood.  

Go figure.