Should I Call a Roofer? How to Reshingle a Garage Roof

When you have to do work on your house, you always have to weigh the cost and benefit of hiring someone.

If you’re someone that enjoys doing jobs around the house, then you may be able to avoid hiring plumbers, electricians, or builders to take care of small jobs. Your roof shingles might be a different story, though. It’s a dangerous job and if you don’t know what you’re doing, it could result in nasty injuries.

Today, we’re going to tell you how to reshingle a garage roof and help you decide whether it’s worth it for you to make this a DIY project or if it’s better to just call a roofer. A garage roof isn’t very big, but there are still major risks to reshingling it yourself.

Learning How to Reshingle a Garage Roof

Reshingling a small garage roof is a relatively simple job, but only if you know what you’re doing. Here, we’ll lay out the steps involved in tackling this job head-on.

• First, remove all of the old shingles by prying them off with a pitchfork.
• Nail down all of the loose sheathings to the rafters and cover the roof deck with felt underlayment, stapling it down.
• Put your flashing on the lower edge of the roof and the chalk line down the center of the roof to keep everything straight.
• Start your shingling at the bottom of the roof with an overhang to protect the wood from water damage, then add each subsequent row, overlapping them by half each time until you reach the top.
• Make sure to use 3 or for nails in each shingle you put down.
• Once you reach the top, change the direction you lay the shingles and cover the crest(s) with shingles that you’ve cut into thirds.

Once you’ve finished laying the shingles, there’s not much more to it. As long as you’re safe and you’ve got the proper tools, there’s no reason that you can’t do this on your own.

DIY or Calling the Pros

If you’re someone that relishes new challenges or you’ve already reshingled a roof in the past, then you might find this a fun and rewarding DIY project. However, those that have never done something like this and you’re not particularly handy, getting up on the roof might not be the project to start with.

Roofing sounds easy, but it’s a very dangerous job because you could fall off the roof or put a nail through your hand. It might be better to call in a roofing professional now and work up to a project like this down the road when you’re more comfortable.

The Choice Is Yours

Now that you know how to reshingle a garage roof, you can decide whether or not it’s something worth taking on right now. A roofer will cost more in the short-term, but at least you’ll know that the job was done professionally, so you shouldn’t have to worry about it again for many, many years. That being said, it’s something you could do on your own so the choice is yours.

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