I have written about roofing felt on this site before, about how roofing felt can be a great roofing material – if used properly. Some people have wanted to know if roofing felt is suitable for garage roofing – perhaps because they are worried that laying felt on their garage roof is too difficult and may cause problems. For those people, let us look into roofing felt in combination with garage roofing.
First of all, if you had access to statistics about which building elements fail the most, you would see roofs and bathrooms at the top. Why is that? Well, both have the purpose of controlling moisture somehow – bathrooms must keep water inside them and direct it to a floor drain, and roofs must keep the water outside them – and direct it to a functional rain gutter. Now – if there is one undisputable truth about water, it is that it will get in anywhere. If there is enough pressure, if there is no way to drain it away, it will penetrate almost anything. You don’t have to make a whole lot of mistakes when constructing a waterproof membrane such as a roof or a bathroom – to make it less than waterproof.
If we forget about bathrooms and concentrate on roofing for a minute, you might think it should be easy to build a roof that keeps the water out. After all, a roof slopes, which means gravity will simply “pull” that water off it, right? Right – except that there are variables in play here, with the most important one being what your roofing material is, and how (well) you have installed it. Roofing felt is no better or worse than many other materials, but it has its advantages in certain settings. For an example, it is very well suited for flat roofing, since it can be laid in such a manner that the entire roof becomes a single membrane. This is something you cannot do with shingles or tiles, which is why these are never used on flat roofs. The shallow slope would allow rainwater to flow “uphill” given strong enough winds, and find its way in between the tiles/shingles. These forms of roofing material are better suited for pitched roofs.
To get back to the question of whether roofing felt works for a garage roof, the answer is yes! It works for any roof – but since many garages are often made with flat roofs, it is especially suited there. Another reason is the fact that roofing a garage usually does not involve dealing with more complicated contructions such as dormers or chimneys – or l-shaped roofs for that matter. Most garages are simple, rectangular buildings, which makes it a matter of rolling the felt out from one end to the other. You still have to pay attention to edges and doing correct overlaps from one sheet to the next, but as long as the roof is simple in shape and function, you will only have to do a minimal amount of this sort of work. The thing is – no matter what roofing material you are using, there will be potential problems around the more complicated roof details. Roofing felt at least allows you to “glue” stuff together – something you can’t say about slate shingles!
More about roofing felt
Category: Garage Roofing Materials,Roofing Felt
Back to Garage Roofing
