Pequot Lakes Bungalow — GAF HDZ Re-Roof

A few blocks from the bobber — the water tower painted like Paul Bunyan's fishing bobber back in 1987 — this bungalow was built in the 1930s and has kept its original lines: tapered porch columns, wide overhangs, exposed rafter tails. The house had gone through two roofing cycles before this job, both times with a plain three-tab shingle that never quite matched the character of the place.

The homeowners wanted something closer to what the house would have worn originally. We talked it through and landed on GAF Timberline HDZ in slate grey — the dimensional shadow at the tab line holds its own against those deep overhangs, and the color reads close to weathered cedar without the upkeep or the insurance headaches that come with real cedar shake these days.

The 9/12 pitch meant hand-nailing the upper courses — a pneumatic nailer doesn't get close enough to the ridge on a steep bungalow roof without bumping the rafter tails. We ran the job with a four-person crew over two days. The deck had one soft board near a valley and a section of old skip sheathing along the front gable that needed to come out and get replaced with OSB before the new underlayment went down.

Ice-and-water shield ran six feet up from each drip edge and through both valleys — more than code minimum, which matters on a lake-country roof through a Crow Wing County winter. The front porch ceiling is original bead board, so we ran plastic sheeting over it during tear-off to keep it clean. Site cleared with a magnetized roller at the end of each day, dumpster staged off the alley. The owners said the slate grey reads exactly the way they pictured it against the original trim.