How to Buy Roofing

Video Transcript

"Four walls and a roof and we have a house so how do I know how much roofing we need for the roof? I'm Robert Markey, I've been doing construction for many years and we're going to talk about how to buy roofing and there are a lot of different kinds of roofings, but they're all sold in what's called a square, which is 100 square feet. So when you order roofing, you want a certain number of squares of roofing. Let's talk specifically about asphalt, asphalt shingles. Cedar shingles, shakes, basically in the same category. The metal roofing gets a little different. So you calculate the square footage of say this side of the roof, it's 30 by 20, OK? That's 600 square feet. So this roof would take 6 square of roofing plus. You got your ridge cap, OK? Your ridge cap is basically a foot wide, if it's 30 feet long on your ridge cap, that's 30 feet of ridge cap so now we need another third of a square, OK? You also, your first coarser shingles is a shingle laid upside down so you got 30 feet plus 6 inches so now you've got another 15 feet. So now you've got basically 6 and a half square of roofing for here. What else do you need for the roof? Well you need drip edge and you need tar paper and you may want ice and water shield. But for your tar paper, your 6 and a half square is fine, you need the exact same amount. For your drip edge, it's the lengths for the bottom you want the wide drip edge which is 6 inch drip edge and so you want 30 feet of the wide drip edge for the bottom. The sides you want the narrow drip edge, it's like 3 inch drip edge and so you've got 20 feet on this side, 20 feet on that side so you've got 40 feet of that. On the other side of the roof, if it's exactly the same, you double everything and you're done. You can order an extra and this kind of roofing is sold in bundles which is a third of a square so you figure out how many square, how many bundles you need and add an extra bundle maybe just for waste and you're good. This is Robert Markey, we've been talking about how to buy roofing."