A Story-Pole Approach to Shingling a Roof
 |  | [Click for larger image] |
Although roofing isn’t one of my favorite tasks, I do appreciate a straight, well-installed job. But my eyes aren’t what they used to be. These days, I find it harder and harder to see pencil marks made on the dark tarpaper needed to set my alignment chalk lines. So, to make it easier for me to see the marks for the chalk lines, I put them on drywall tape. As shown in the illustration, I make marks on the drywall tape indicating the top edges of shingle courses. - I put them at 40-inch intervals for shingles with 5-inch exposure so that I can check the installation every eight courses. In the example shown, the 11-1⁄2-inch mark allows for the starter and first course of 12-inch wide shingles to extend 1⁄2 inch past the metal drip edge.
- The subsequent marks on the tape refer to the exposure of the shingles plus the 12-inch width of the overlapping shingles. For example, the top of the second shingle course is 17 inches (5 inches + 12 inches) up from the bottom of the first shingle. For any given course above, the top of the shingle is 12 inches higher: 17 inches, 22 inches, 27 inches, 32 inches, 37 inches and so forth.
- I unroll strips of tape on the ground and mark them there all at the same time. That step makes it easier to be accurate and lets me avoid the step of pulling a tape on a shingle to get a reference point. A fold at the end of each piece of tape hooks onto the metal drip edge.
- I staple these tape strips atop the tarpaper at 12-foot to 15-foot intervals.
Then I snap chalk lines without having to hunt around for a hard-to-see pencil mark or snaking my tape down to the drip edge, hoping it won’t pull off as I get to the top of the roof. ― Bob Bulick Tips & Techniques provided by Fine Homebuilding.
©2005 The Taunton Press | 
