How to Tear Off Shingles

[Music] thank you [Music] if your roof already has shingles on it tearing them off and preparing your deck is an important step in making sure that you get the most out of your new roof in this section you'll see the steps necessary to take off your old roof clean everything up and prepare your deck for new shingles [Music] in the past it was more common to leave a layer of shingles on the house and apply new shingles on top of the old ones in fact over the years I've torn off roofs with multiple layers of roofing laid on top of each other once in an old house we took off the original Cedar Shakes which had three layers of shingles nailed on top a layer of OSB decking nailed on top of that and then a new layer of shingles laid on top of that in recent years we've realized that laying over new shingles over old isn't as good of an idea and I strongly encourage you to avoid this practice there are several reasons why laying over is a bad idea in my experience ruse with more than one layer of shingles are far more likely to leak and when they do it's much harder to diagnose the source of the leak because you've got all these different layers on there and water running in between also the second layer of shingle never really lasts as long as they would if they were applied over a clean deck when you lay over the new layer of shingles also never looks nearly as good as they would if it was applied over a clean deck the first layer always leads to a lumpy look that you can avoid by tearing off the old roof additionally it's also impossible to inspect the condition of the decking closely if you don't tear the old roof off first you don't want to install your new roof over old rotten decking the weight of two or more layers may also be too heavy for the roof structure to support as you can see there are great many reasons to tear off your old roof first don't listen to those who might tell you they did it many times or that's how it's supposed to be done as a roofing professional who's inspected thousands of roofs I can tell you that two layer roofs are simply far lower quality than single layer roofs the way I see it while the tear off may seem like a lot of extra work the whole project is still expensive and labor intensive you might as well get the most out of your time and money by doing the job right the first time that said I know some of y'all are going to want to lay over anyway and at the end of this section I'll give you a few pointers on how to prepare your roof if you're going to leave the shingles on hey everybody thank you so much for watching this video please hit subscribe so you can be a part of my channel you can watch all my videos that cover complete stages of both shingle and metal roofing there's tons more content coming out soon about all aspects of roofing including skylights and trim and sheds and whatever you're interested in before you get going tearing off your roof you want to give cleanup and staging a little thought obviously tearing off thousands of shingles and Nails can be a bit messy experience I'd recommend moving anything out of the way that you can such as lawn furniture Planters or landscaping lights get a few tarps and lay them over your lawn and shrubs even if you can throw the shingles off the roof into a dumpster you want to protect your yard from the straight nail or shingle that's going to inevitably fall off the roof you might want to give some thought to protecting your attic space as well generally a little bit of debris in the Attic is not a big problem but if your house has decking that's made of one buys like one by sixes or one by eights you stand a pretty good chance of getting trash down into your attic through all the gaps in the all those different boards in this case putting a few tarps or sheets down in the Attic first will save you a big Dusty cleanup later if you have plywood decking you probably don't need to worry about this too much as we don't see a lot of debris getting into the attic with those tear-offs another step you should take before you start tearing off shingles is to protect any holes in your roof that debris might fall into one area where this is common is if you have an exhaust fan that vents a range hood or something like that if you've got vents vents like this Square vent or a turbine vent you're going to take these off first and then cover the opening with a piece of felt paper or a piece of OSB to prevent trash from falling down into your attic or into the exhaust fan over the range hood because when you're tearing everything off stuff's flying debris is going everywhere it's going to fall down into that hole so putting something over it or especially a piece of OSB is a good idea because then you're not going to also step into the hole while you're working if you know that you won't be able to tear off your whole roof and dry it in with underlayment in one day just tear off as much as you can and roll out your felt before the end of the day no one wants to wake up in the middle of the night to an unexpected rain shower coming in their house it's happened before there's no real science to tearing off your roof however you do it you just want to get all the old shingles and nails off and leave yourself with a completely clean deck when you're finished as I mentioned in the tools section one of these Garden Forks works great to tear off the shingles and I'll show you how to do that in a second your other option is to use a shingle remover tool like this and it works really well because it's got these little teeth at the end that will help you pry out any nails that are left in the decking this is a great tool to use if you've got um a lot of work to do you can get one of these it'll probably save you a little bit of time but of course this thing's not cheap it's 50 60 bucks and then when you're done tearing off your shingles there's not much else that you can do with this unless you're going to be doing a lot of work tearing off shingles in the future so if you've got a little bit to do I'd recommend just going with a garden fork and I'm going to show you how we do that one technique that works well is to use your tool to loosen the shingles and then come back and rip off the shingles by hand and stack them on your feet like this that way you can just carry the stack over to where you can throw them off the roof I like this because it minimizes the number of times you have to handle the shingles and also keeps them from making a big mess in the yard once you've gotten most of the shingles off the roof you have a good many nails left to be pulled a claw hammer or flat bar works well for getting these nails out you can just propound the straight nail or two back into the deck but most of the nails you want to just go ahead and get out sometimes I if I know that the deck is in good shape I'll leave some of the old felt paper on if it doesn't come off really easily with the tear off generally though it's better to clean everything up that way you'll have a good look at your deck so that you can repair any damaged wood you'd be surprised at how often we find damaged wood on roofs that don't have any noticeable leaks pay particular attention to the areas around the edges of the roof and around any penetration such as chimneys and pipes take a look around and notice if any of the decking looks like it's loose around the edges or popping up anywhere now is the time to apply a few Nails here and there to tighten this up once you've gotten your old roof torn off and the decking repaired you're ready to apply underlayment and get going on your shingles if you're dead set on laying your shingles over top of the old layer I'm going to give you a few tips on doing that so that it comes out looking good first you're going to need to tear off any shingles on the ridges and the hips as these are going to be too high and you won't be able to apply your new shingles around these areas next what you want to do is cut back the shingles around the edges of the roof this is going to clean up the perimeter and allow you to apply a piece of drip edge like this over top of the shingles on the edge this drip edge is going to hide the old shingles and make your new roof with the layover look much better when you're applying your new shingles over top of the old you can basically follow the same guidelines that I've outlined in the other chapters make sure that you use a longer nail like an inch and three quarters so that it goes through the first layer of shingles and in through the decking like I described before there are some guidelines for laying another layer of shingles over so that they lay flat and kind of nest in the previous layer but honestly these steps are pretty complicated and I don't think that the new roof comes out looking that much better if you use them suffice it to say if you're going to lay over your new roof really isn't going to be looking as good as it would if you're torn the old roof off and started from scratch [Music] if you'd like the complete series for yourself on how to do shingle or metal roofing you can go to my website roofingintelligence.com and there you can get a membership to either stream or you can get a DVD in the mail it'll show you how to do all the steps for either of those types of roofing enjoy this video thanks so much for watching

Channel: RoofingIntelligence.com

Views: 4,631

Keywords: roofing, asphalt roofing, how too, how to install roofing, how to install shingles, installing shingles, roof repair, roof replacement, how to install a new roof, diy roofing, roof shingles, roofing shingles, three tab shingles, architectural shingles, roofing instruction, shingle installation, roofing a house, roofing a shed

Id: 2AoEWAOLbgc

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2023