Baxter Farmhouse — GAF HDZ Replacement

The farmhouse sits on five wooded acres off County Road 48 outside Baxter, a few miles from where the lakes start showing up on the map. The owners have been there eleven years and had been patching the same three-tab shingle roof since they bought the place. By August the north slope was down to bare felt in two spots after a hailstorm worked through Crow Wing County in June.

We scheduled the job for late October, when crews move fast ahead of the ground freeze and homeowners want certainty before Thanksgiving. The original roof had no ice-and-water shield at the eaves — standard practice decades ago, but a problem on a 10/12 pitch with deep soffits once winter sets in. First step after tear-off: ice-and-water shield six feet up from the drip edge on every eave and valley.

The replacement material is GAF Timberline HDZ in weathered-wood charcoal. The HDZ laminate profile holds up through the freeze-thaw swings that run November through March here — Brainerd averages about 47 inches of snow a season, and January highs sit around 20°F with lows near zero. The SBS-modified asphalt core handles that thermal shock better than the old three-tab product that came off. Warranty is 50 years lifetime limited on the shingles, plus a 25-year WindProven certification at 110 mph once the full system — starter, field shingle, hip and ridge — is in place. We ran GAF StormGuard for the ice-and-water underlayment and FeltBuster synthetic underlayment across the field.

Total project: tear-off, deck inspection with two replaced boards, new underlayment, new GAF Timberline HDZ, new copper gutters to replace the damaged aluminum, and a ridge ventilation upgrade. Three-day job, done before the first hard freeze. The owners said the house felt warmer within two weeks — ridge-to-soffit airflow that never existed on the original build, finally working the way it should.