Garages, Pole Barns and Outbuildings: Roofing the Rest of Your Property

Drive west of Howell toward Fowlerville, north toward Cohoctah, or south into Marion and Iosco townships and the properties change. Acreage. A house, a detached garage, a pole barn, sometimes a small horse barn and a shed. The house gets a new roof. The outbuildings wait. Then one spring the pole barn roof is dripping on the tractor. Here is how we approach the other roofs on a Livingston County property, and why doing them with the house is usually the right call.

The detached garage

A detached two or three-bay garage is the most common outbuilding we roof. It is also the one most likely to have been built or re-roofed by a previous owner on a weekend. We open these up and find shingles over shingles, no drip edge, no underlayment, and a ridge held together by roofing cement.

We roof a detached garage the same way we roof the house. Tear-off to the deck, replace what is soft, ice and water barrier at the eaves, synthetic underlayment, drip edge on every edge, matching architectural shingle, and a ridge vent so the garage stops sweating in March. If the garage is in the same view as the house, it gets the same shingle color. A mismatched garage roof drags down the whole property from the road.

Pole barns and steel roofs

Most pole barns in this county have exposed-fastener steel roofing. Steel is a good product for a barn, and it lasts, but it has one weak point: the screws. Every screw has a rubber washer. After fifteen to twenty years of summer heat and winter cold, the washers crack, the screws back out, and every one of them becomes a drip.

The options are to re-screw the roof with larger-diameter screws and new washers, which buys years, or to replace the panels. We look at the panel condition, the purlin condition underneath, and whether the barn is insulated or heated. A heated pole barn with no vapor barrier has usually rotted its purlins from condensation and needs more than screws. We will tell you which situation you are in.

Barns with shingle roofs

Older barns and carriage houses around Howell and Fowlerville often have shingle roofs on board sheathing with wide gaps. Shingles need a solid nailing surface. On these we re-sheet over the boards with new decking before shingling. It adds a step but it is the difference between a roof that lasts and one that looks wavy and fails at every gap.

Sheds, lean-tos and covered porches

Low-slope sections are where outbuilding roofs fail first. A lean-to off the side of a barn with a 1/12 pitch cannot be shingled, no matter what the last guy did. It needs a membrane or standing-seam steel. We see a lot of shingled lean-tos in this county with tar poured across them every few years. We can fix that permanently.

Why do them together

• One mobilization. The crew, the dumpster and the material delivery are already on your property. Adding the garage to the house job is efficient in a way that coming back next year is not.
• One color. Shingle colors shift slightly between production runs. Roofing everything at once from the same lot means the house and garage match exactly.
• One warranty date. Everything on the property is on the same schedule going forward.
• Insurance. If a storm claim is what triggered the house roof, the outbuildings are usually on the same policy and were hit by the same storm. We inspect them together and document them together.

Access on rural lots

Gravel drives, septic fields and soft ground in spring matter when a loaded truck and a dumpster show up. We walk the property first and figure out where equipment can and cannot go. Nobody wants a dumpster parked on a drain field.

If you have more than one roof

Have us look at all of them at once. We inspect the house, garage, barn and sheds in one visit and give you a written plan that covers everything, with the option to do it all together or in stages. Request a free inspection and tell us what is on the property.