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Sometimes repairing or replacing your roof can be too costly. In this article we’re going to give you some asphalt shingle installation tips, so you can do it yourself.

First, you need to consider felt paper and drip edges:

Felt Paper and Drip Edges

Do you need to use felt paper? On new roofs the answer is yes. Re-roof jobs do not require it. I prefer to apply the felt as I go if at all possible. If you do the entire roof and the felt gets wet or dew covered, it will wrinkle. These wrinkles can telegraph through thin standard 3 tab shingles! Not only that, if the weather is hot and you walk up a felt covered roof, the felt can and will tear. You will be on the ground before you know what happened. If you apply felt as you go, you can just use a minimum amount of nails. Within minutes hundreds of nails from the shingles will pierce it.

Drip edges are corrosion resistant metal strips that protect the exposed ends of the roof deck at the bottom and sides of the roof. Drip edges go on the bottom of the roof before felt paper is applied. However, they are applied on top of the felt on the side edges of the roof. If you install a roof membrane, it must be installed before any of the drip edge. The membrane actually should lap over onto the gutter board!

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Some good points to consider for sure.  In order to keep costs down, you also need to make sure you get the right number of shingles for the job as Wikihow suggests:

Install Asphalt Shingles

Get the right number of shingles for the job. It generally takes three bundles of shingles to cover 100 square feet (9.29 square meters). Asphalt shingle “bundles” are actually sealed in packages (the term bundle comes from wooden shingles which actually came tied up with wire in bundles). Measure your roof and buy appropriately.

Measure the length and width of the individual sections of the roof, multiplying them together to determine the area. Add the areas of each section together, then divide by 100 to get the correct number of squares. Multiply this number by 3 to get the number of bundles you’ll need to buy.

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Now ofcourse before you put in new shingles, you’ll probably need to take the old one’s out.  Hammerzone tells you how to do just that:

Do-It-Yourself Roof Replacement:

This tool is a shingle scraper. It is basically a flat-blade shovel with some big teeth. There is a triangular “heel” welded to the bottom, which acts like a ramp to pivot the scraper against and lift the shingles from the roof.

The scraper is simply pushed under the shingles and lifted. This tool does a decent job of prying up the roofing nails as well.

Get the rest of the tutorial here…

Well there you have it.  If you don’t have the money or just want to get your hands dirty, now you can!  If the task seems too daunting though, give us a call and we’ll make sure the job gets done right.

Tags: asphalt shingles, diy, roof replacement, roofing