The owners of this A-Frame, hill-top home in Marin County, CA, were having repeated wind damage issues with their relatively new asphalt “50 year” shingles. They saw the Omega Shake in solid copper on their neighbor’s home and decided that they liked it enough to make the change themselves. Because their home sat right on a wind-swept ridge, both the original wood shake and the new asphalt shingle were unable to deal with the regular gales. At once, they eliminated their wind issue and upgraded their home by switching to a metal roof in copper.
OK, well maybe not THIS month – how about November, 1957?! Yes, the photo, taken the summer of 2008, is of a house just south of Reno, Nevada, that was originally built in 1957. Still has the original metal shingles, and there’s no apparent end to their life expectancy even now. In this part of the world, there is simply no other material that can offer this kind of long-term usefulness. I know that there were some repairs done a few years back – it turned out that some of the original nails had corroded though – improper application, it turned out – but even then the roof performed over 40 years without any service, and with that completed it has another few generations of performance still in the tank.
Seeing this first hand just confirms what I tell my clients every day – metal is absolutely the best value in roof materials. Period.
