What should I use to cover the sloping roof of a small shed? Here:
Well there is felt and there is felt... if you slap on a single layer of "shed felt", it will last a couple of years if you are lucky. If on the other hand you do a couple of layers of torch on modified bitument felt
- say a 2mm base layer, and a 4mm mineral finished cap sheet, you should get twenty or more out of it.
Depends a bit on what you use the shed for!
Storing garden tools and maybe dustbins. But I find your reply strange: what happens to the roofing material can hardly be affected by what's in the shed, can it?
I'm looking at Travis Perkins item 652113:
I think the point is whether what you keep in it is worth the cost and trouble of doing a premium job on the roof or not.
That appears to be intended as the top sheet in the sort of multi-layer roof John described.
Colin Bignell
it's the other way round, what happens to the stuff in the shed if the roofing material fails,
for a few garden hand tools and a bin, you just dry them off and replace the roofing,
If your 'shed' is like mine, and one half is general storage of things that really shouldn't get wet, and the other half houses breeding birds, CCTV equipment, incubators and so on, then a leaking roof would be a little more of a problem, so i spent the money on a decent felt job expecting a good 10 to 15 year life at least.
well, the value and importance of the content may affect how much effort and money you want to put into making it waterproof!
Can't actually see a thickness on that - but judging by the weight and length, it looks like a budget cap sheet - perhaps not quite as scabby as what B&Q would sell you as "shed felt", but then again the note that its not suitable for habitable buildings might you give cause for thought.
Normally I would go for something like a layer or two of:
then :
Torch on felts are more expensive that glue on ones, but there is not much in it by the time you include the price of the glue, and they are so much quicker and easier to use than big tins of black sticky gloop, that there is no content IMHO.
If you want something that lasts, then try and avoid the normal shed installers trick of sticking galvanised clout nails through the top sheet, since its only a matter of time before you get leaks round the nails. If you must nail, then nail a underlay on, and then bond the cap sheet to that.
Thank you. Is torching on easily done? I don't want to set fire to anything!
Have just re-done next door's cheapo shed after 10 years. Fortunately the OSB roof would still take the nails. A tenner every decade doesn't seem too bad to me
Covering the cheap shed felt with this stuff:
works brilliantly in my experience. Keeps the sun off the normal felt, which has its job reduced to only having to stop any water that gets blown up under the corrugations. Still going strong 20 years on.
In message , Peter Percival writes
I re-did my shed roof with Onduline, or something very similar, from Wickes in 2009. I used screws with washers under the heads through the peaks to fix it, as I didn't want to bounce any of the things hanging from the roof or to wake the neighbours with nails.
It still seems as good as new, although perhaps slightly crisper. When it was new I walked on it to pick overhanging damsons. I think I would hesitate to do that now.
I was very lucky in that the sheet lengths almost exactly matched the shed roof size, so I reckoned at the time that it was cheaper than felt
Tis true.
B&Q "shed felt" has done 8 but does now need replacing. galvanised clouts used to hold it down, no goop.
Agreed, two layers of torch on is a bit OTT for garden tools and pots etc. B-)
I might look at the corrogated sheet stuff to replace the felt but I'm not sure how to stop the wind, which can do this:
Simply ripping the sheets off.
The wind has also taken the whole roof and the gables of the box of the shed and threw it into the field the otherside of the road. That roof was sheets of OSB covered in felt.
*1 several times over. No more expensive than all the bits you have to buy for felting (different felt types, clout nails, glue, protective clothing, etc) and can be done in one afternoon with no cleaning, clearing up, or major and continuous physical effort.
The new-build workshop was roofed this way and I've since placed it over deteriorating felt (20 years old) on two other sheds.
Rob
Agriculturally one might nail through laths of treated softwood laid up the slope. About 18" apart. Marginally better than clout nails in a wind.
Yup, very easy. Cut you length of felt to approximate size and position it where is will go. Now roll it back up, keeping it in place on the roof.
Using a *big* blowtorch (something with a nozzel at least an inch wide), you play it mostly over the back of the felt, and partly onto the deck to warm it. (There is a plastic film on the back of the felt that disperses as its heated and it takes on a "wet" look). As it does this you unroll it and keep heating the new bit. The weight of the roll pushes the wet edge down on to the roof. It sticks like the proverbial and gives a result as good or better than traditionally hot tar bonded roofing IME.
Some nice examples of how to on youtube. E.g.
s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofing_feltI read that UV light reduces
Box profile metal roofing sheet. There will be a local supplier. They will cut it to size for you & provide the fixings & trims. You can get various life spans and lots of colours.
Felt is shit.
If you need to cut costs on a small shed you can always use one roll of capsheet for both layers.
I'm a fan of black gloop to stick it down, its the most secure fixing method, cheap and helps prolong the felt life. I definitely dont like nails, they shorten felt life. Its a must to use junk clothing, bitumen will get them ruined.
Rigid sheeting is of course the better product, but 2 layers of a synthetic fibre felt glued down with gloop works pretty well, and is certainly cheap. If you dont have black gloop, it has other uses too:
NT
It's good of you to post the link, but that fellow knows what he's doing :-).
Well now you have seen it, so do you ;-)
That's a bit of a bugger. Did you manage to re-use that shed or did it become firewood?
I'd just spent about two days recladding it and replacing the rotten (OSB) floor with 18 mm WBP ply. It wasn't going to become firewood. B-)
Must have dismantled it to get it back inplace, not sure what I did about the busted ends to the roofing planks. It's now staked to the ground at each corner with 1 1/4" sq treated ex tree stakes driven in as far as I could get them but at least 18", these are bolted through to the wall frames. It doesn't move now and the roof is strapped to the wall frames as well with metal brackets/plates so that isn't going flying across the road again either.
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