Home / Blog / Replacing the Roof on an Older Maquoketa Home
Your house is a hundred years old. The roof job is different.
Layered shingles, plank decking, attics with no air moving through them. What we find when we tear off an older Maquoketa roof, and how we handle it when we do.
A lot of the houses in town here were framed between 1900 and the 1940s. They are good houses, built by people who knew what they were doing with the material they had. But a roof replacement on one of them is not the same job as one on a house built in 1995, and anybody who quotes it like it is has not been in the attic. Here is what the age of the house actually changes.
Everything has to come off
On a house this old we almost always find more than one layer up there. Somebody shingled over the original in the sixties, somebody shingled over that in the nineties, and now there is a stack of asphalt sitting on framing that was sized for one. Going over it again is cheaper on paper and it is the wrong call. You bury every problem instead of fixing it, and the new shingles telegraph every ridge and cup underneath them.
So we tear off to the bare deck. All of it. That is a bigger day and a bigger dumpster than a single layer strip, and we tell you that up front instead of finding it on the roof and asking for more money that afternoon. It also means we see the actual condition of the structure, which on a house this age is the whole point.
Plank decking and the overlay decision
Under those layers you are usually not looking at plywood. Older Maquoketa houses were decked with individual boards, one by six or one by eight, laid across the rafters with gaps between them. That was correct for the wood shingles the house was originally built for, because those shingles needed air on both sides. It is a problem for asphalt.
Modern shingles need a nailable surface everywhere the fastener lands, and a nail that hits a gap between planks is a nail holding nothing. Boards cup and split with age too, so the surface goes uneven enough to show through the finished roof. When we find wide gaps, or boards that are split or soft at the ends, the honest answer is an overlay of new sheathing across the whole plane.
Not every old roof needs it. Tight decking in sound shape gets spot repairs and we move on. But it is common enough on in town houses of this vintage that we talk about it before we start, not after. If we open the roof and the deck is worse than it looked from the ground, that is a written change with a fixed written price attached, signed before the saw comes out.
Attics that cannot breathe
Climb into the attic of a 1915 house and you will often find no ridge vent, no soffit vents, and maybe a single gable louver at each end painted shut sometime during the Truman administration. The house was never designed to move air up there, and in a lot of cases somebody later blew insulation right up against the eaves and sealed off what little intake there was.
A roof over a dead attic cooks. Shingles age from underneath, the deck stays damp through the winter, and you shorten the life of a brand new roof before the truck leaves the driveway. Nearly every warranty on the market also requires intake and exhaust to be in balance, so a roof installed over an unvented attic can be a roof with no warranty behind it.
Fixing it is usually not dramatic. Cut in a continuous ridge vent, open the soffits and add intake, pull the insulation back off the eaves and hold it there with baffles so it stays back. It is a modest piece of the job that changes how long everything above it lasts, and we build it into the plan rather than treating it as an upsell.
Ice dams start at the eaves
If you have had water show up on the ceiling near an outside wall in February, that is an ice dam, and it is a heat problem more than a roof problem. Warm air leaks into the attic, melts the snow above it, the water runs down to the cold overhang, freezes there, and backs up under the shingles. Old houses do this constantly because the ceiling leaks air at every light fixture, and the eaves are the thinnest insulated part of the house.
Shingles alone do not stop it. Ice and water membrane run well up from the eave, past the interior wall line, gives the backed up water a sealed surface to hit instead of a nail hole. Pair that with the ventilation work and air sealing below, and you take most of the fuel out of the problem. We would rather talk about all three at once than sell you a roof and let you find out next winter that nothing changed.
Steep pitches, old chimneys, tired flashing
Houses from this era were built steep. Twelve on twelve is not unusual, and there are dormers, valleys, and porch roofs tucked in at odd angles. Steep means staging, roof jacks, and fall protection rather than walking it, so the work goes slower and takes more people. It is not a reason to avoid the job. It is a reason your neighbor’s ranch quoted differently than your foursquare did.
Then there are the chimneys. Most of the brick in town predates everybody reading this, and the flashing around it is often the original tin, or a bead of roof cement somebody smeared on twenty years ago and called good. Cemented flashing is not flashing. We cut a reglet into the mortar joint, set step flashing up the sides, and run counterflashing over it. Same story at sidewalls, dormer cheeks, and old plumbing stacks with rotted collars.
One more thing, since it comes up every spring here. When a storm rolls through, out of town crews knock doors wanting a signature before anybody has been on the roof. Be careful about handing your claim to somebody you cannot find in November. We are happy to walk the roof, look at your scope of loss with you, and put our own numbers on paper. If the roof does not need replacing, we will tell you that too.
How we handle what we find
Nobody can see through shingles. On a house this old there will be something under there that was not visible from the ladder: a rafter tail gone punky, a soft spot at a valley, deck that has been wet for years around a stack. What separates an honest roofer from a bad experience is not whether surprises happen. It is what happens in the ten minutes after we find one.
Our rule is simple. Work stops, we photograph it, we show you, and we write it up with a fixed written price before anything else gets done. No verbal numbers, no shrug, no line item that appears on the final invoice you never agreed to. You decide with the picture in front of you. That is how we have run every project since we started, and it is why people around here call us back.
If you own an older place in town and the roof is due, we would rather look at it before it leaks than after. Read more about our roofing work in Maquoketa, call Collin at (563) 581-3819, or send a note through the contact page. We will get in the attic, walk the roof, and give you a straight answer about what it needs and what it does not.