Cedar roof types in Minneapolis
In the past twenty five years I have inspected over 9000 cedar roofs in the Minneapolis-St.Paul area. That’s a lot of climbing. In that time I’ve seen just about every type of cedar roof imaginable as well as all manor of defect and curiosity imaginable. That timeframe has allowed me to observe a number of roofs over their entire lifespan, from install to death. In fact, I have relationships with dozens of cedar roofs that have spanned over two decades. Normally, that roof will belong to a few homeowners and when I am called to inspect, the new homeowner doesn’t usually know I have a history with their home. It’s always entertaining to explain that I’ve worked on their home over the past ten or fifteen years.
I was just asked in a seminar I was teaching on cedar roofs to home inspectors (https://www.facebook.com/MinnesotaHomeInspections) about the most common types of cedar roofs in Minneapolis and their relative market representation. Above is a graphic I created to communicate those statistics. In short, the 24″ medium hand-split cedar shake is still be far the most common material applied when it comes to wood roofs. That said, the people of Kuhl work hard every day to communicate the advantages of using heavy hand-split cedar shakes whenever possible. The fact is that it can last 30%-50% longer than medium hand-split shakes but it only costs roughly 11%-15% more. The ROI analysis on those numbers is pretty simple. At this point, the only clients of ours that choose medium shakes over heavies do so because they are about to sell their homes. People who are going to be there for more than five or ten years tend to see the wisdom in upgrading to heavy shakes.