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The Tech of a New Roof and Black Flies

No hammers, no fly swatters

Our home. All photos by author

We have had three reshingling experiences in our lives: one shortly after buying our first home, one when we left there, and one last week for the home we moved to fifteen years ago. The first job was two men with a ladder and hammers, the last was a ten man crew with pneumatic coil nailers.

Coil nails

Old advice

Traditional advice for shingling was to get out of Dodge City while the guys pound above. Hammers and roofing nails make a lot of noise. Pneumatic tools are much more quiet and most people should be able to put up with it. They are also much quicker; our entire project was done in a single day.

You’d also be warned to take down all the pictures because the hammering and stomping would knock them off their hooks. Our pictures were not straight when the noise stopped, but nothing fell.

All the other suggestions I found online made sense and were things I would have done anyway. So we stayed home and were not bothered by the noise.

But there was something I missed