During the winter, in order to keep our guys working, we sometimes take on a house in which we do a total rehab. This rehab house is located on Dublin Ave in Cary Illinois. The rehab took 3 and 1/2 months and entailed the total restoration of the interior as well as a new mansard roof installation, new oversized gutters, exterior painting, and some exterior trim replacement.
Let’s look at the Before Pictures of the Mansard Roof
As you can see from these pictures we started this project in the winter. What you can also see is the roof really isn’t very old. We estimate that the roof is only 4 or 5 years old. One glaring problem with the old roof is it was literally falling off of the building. On every elevation of the mansard sections of the roof shingles had come loose and had fallen to the ground. Leaving the roof exposed to the rain and snow.
Installing shingles on a mansard style roof is very different than installing shingles on a regular pitch roof. For one thing 
you are installing the shingles on a surface that is almost a vertical wall. This poses issues in that gravity is doing more to pull the shingles to the ground than it is pulling the shingles to the roof deck. As you can see from these before pictures, gravity is pulling the shingles down, ripping through the nails, and off of the roof to the ground. There is a very specific way mansard roofs must be installed which we will talk about in a bit.
What About the Gutters?
As you can see these gutters are way under sized for this pitch and size of roof. The existing eaves troughs were standard 5″ aluminum residential gutters with 2″ X 3″ standard downspouts. If you look at the picture of the front valley you can see the inside corner has been through some serious stress. In fact, the inside miter was leaking and was bent down most likely from the weight of ice building up in corner.
You can also see that the paint on the gutters is dirty and faded and just adds an unkempt and unmaintained look to the exterior of the house. The combination of missing shingles on the mansard roof and the old, dirty gutters gave this lovely house a very unappealing curb appeal. One that was not fitting for this nice neighborhood in Cary.
The Correct Way to Install a Mansard Roof
Because of the vertical nature of the roof deck involved in a Mansard Roof installation special attention and techniques must be used to ensure the individual shingles don’t rip free from the field of shingles. A standard asphalt shingle installation involves nailing each shingle with at least 4 nails. On a mansard application, to ensure the shingle does not rip free from the nails due to gravity, at least 6 nails need to be used to secure each individual shingle. But we go further…
On mansard roofing applications we use a special, upgraded shingle made by IKO called Dynasty. The Dynasty line of singles has a feature that makes it perfect for this type of application and almost guarantees the roofing nails will not rip through the shingle. Each Dynasty shingle has a fabric nailing strip interweaved into the shingle that is tear resistant. The band not only strengthens the nail hold on the shingle, it also gives a visible guide and wider nailing area which lessens installation errors such as high nailing or low nailed/exposed nail head situations.
Extra nails combined with the nailing strip feature of the IKO Dynasty shingle ensures our mansard roof installations will not lose shingles like seen on this Cary home.
Let’s Look at the After Pictures of the Roof…
As you can see there is a drastic difference between the before and after pictures of this home.
One thing to note is the color of the roof. A few years back IKO shingles introduced to their Cambridge line of shingles what they called HD colors. These were roughly 8 colors specially designed to give the roof area a deeper more dimensional look. When IKO introduced the Dynasty line they decided to make the HD colors exclusive to this product. So along with the nail strip feature which adds strength and increases the shingle’s wind resistance rating the Dynasty also features special, more dimensional colors, only available in this product line.
How about those New Gutters?
We replaced the standard 5″ aluminum residential gutters with larger, more commercial, 6″ seamless aluminum gutters. This size is good for steep pitched roof and/or large roofs with a lot of water run off. Mansard roofs are a perfect canidate for these larger gutters.
We also replaced the standard 2″X3″ residential downspouts with oversized 3″X4″ downspouts. 3X4’s have twice the flow capacity and gets more water out of the gutter faster to handle heavier rains on larger/steeper roofs. We also extended all of the downspouts 6′ out from the house to make sure water doesn’t flow back into the foundation and into the basement.
Along with the new roof and new gutters, we installed new trim around the window recesses, painted the exterior walls and trim, replaced a small amount of siding on the rear screened in porch, and painted the fascia and soffits.
While we were working on the exterior of this Cary house, many of the neighbors stopped by to tell us how good the work looked and how glad they were that someone was finally fixing up this outdated and unmaintained home. All in all, we feel this project turned out great.
