As promised, here’s the first installment in our 2006 home improvement blog entries. I’m going to use this first entry to get some of the smaller items out of the way.

Trees and the Roof

Where three once stood, now two remain

Tree Pruning/Removal. Every couple years, we have Blue Sky Trees come out and do some work on the trees in our yard. In the back yard, the ornamental cherry and dogwood trees all needed some basic pruning. We also had them trim back a neighbor’s tree that shades our garden. In the front yard, the ornamental crabapple trees were in need of a major pruning, and we had one of three small cedars removed to allow the remaining two more room to grow. We’ve used Blue Sky Trees for several years and recommend them highly for all tree-related services.

Roof Maintenance. Our house has a cedar shake roof, and when we bought it, we only had some very basic maintenance done on the roof as a result of our home inspection. And then we basically neglected it. However, it was always in the back of my mind that we should “do something” about the roof — either replace it with a composition roof or start maintaining the cedar shakes. Seeing as how we had two other major projects planned, we decided we would try to get a few more years out of our existing roof.

New meets old on our roof

I contacted Cedar Tech Roof Care, which specializes in the repair and maintenance of cedar shake roofs. After reading through the extensive information on their website and receiving an estimate, we decided to give them a try. Dan and crew cleaned the entire roof and then replaced numerous worn and damaged shakes with new, premium, thick-cut cedar shakes. They also applied a biodegradable cleaner which they claim will not rot-out gutters or downspouts, stain concrete, harm grass or shrubs, smell bad, or injure animals. And it carries a 5-year warranty against moss and mildew! So did it work?

Well, not surprisingly, that’s a hard question to answer. I mean, it’ll take a few years to know for sure, right? I can say that once they started, they got the job done in a reasonable time and were very professional on the job. I liked Dan’s apparent “do-it-right” approach, and he did not deviate from his original estimate. One complaint we had was that it took a really, really long time for them to actually start (i.e., multiple months!). This was partly due to the weather — understandably, they require several days of no rain in order to work on the roof. On the other hand, we’ve noticed that time management and time estimation is a skill possessed by few contractors and service providers. We suspect this was also partly to blame for the delay. Our other complaint was a lack of communication leading up to the actual work. We broke down and called on at least a couple occasions for an update on when we could expect our job to begin. It took days just to get a call back. My preference would be for them to proactively call us whenever our job gets pushed back, for whatever reason. But again, this isn’t exactly atypical when dealing with these kinds of businesses, and everyone has different preferences and expectations. You just have to roll with it.

Anyway, the roof is now in pretty good shape, and Cedar Tech will return over the next couple years to check the roof and do additional minor repairs as needed. If nothing else, at least now I feel like we’re “doing something” about the roof!

This entry was posted by Steve on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 8:37 pm and is filed under House, Yard/Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.