Princeton Farmhouse — GAF HDZ Replacement

The farmhouse sits on a wooded lot off a gravel road east of Princeton, maybe a quarter-mile from the Rum River floodplain. The owners had lived there 18 years and had been patching the same 3-tab shingle roof since they moved in. By August the north slope was down to bare felt in two spots after a June hailstorm worked through Mille Lacs County.

We scheduled the job for late October, when crews are moving fast before the ground freezes and homeowners need certainty before Thanksgiving. The original roof had no ice-and-water shield at the eaves — standard practice in the 1990s, but a recipe for ice dam infiltration on a 10/12 pitch with deep soffits. First step after tear-off was running ice-and-water shield six feet up from the drip edge on every eave and valley.

The replacement material was GAF Timberline HDZ in weathered-wood charcoal. The HDZ laminate profile holds up well under the freeze-thaw cycles that run from November through March in Mille Lacs County — the SBS-modified asphalt core handles thermal shock better than the older 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 used GAF StormGuard for the ice-and-water underlayment and FeltBuster synthetic underlayment across the field.

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