EXTREME
By Laurie Mercer
Lucky Kavalaukus, age 89, is sitting on the front deck of his Highland Lake cottage telling me that our cottage on Carr Island in New Hampshire, which he looks at every day, does not have a new
metal roof on it. I have to show him pictures to prove that it does.
The classy two-tone patina top on our cottage, which arrived on a
retired party boat with the roofer, does not fit many people’s expectations about what a metal roof is. Things have changed.
I had just been up on the roof taking photographs to illustrate this
article about metal roofs for Extreme How-To. Roofers do have a different perspective on things. From my perch I scanned the sky for the
eagles that the builders had seen, and watched the loons bobbing in
the boat channel.
Our Carr Island camp was built as a hunting and fishing lodge around
1860, and very little had changed except that a series of leaky asphalt
roofs had begun a kind of morphing process that over time demanded
selective tear-downs and rebuilds and some pretty funny comments in
the guest log. The area around the chimney and over the main bedroom
especially was susceptible to wet nights. We repeatedly lugged contractor bags stuffed with nasty, sharp-edged shingles to the town dump.
Just finding roofers to come over by boat to repair the island cottage
roof was so problematic that one year I drove my own roofers from
upstate New York to New Hampshire to take care of it. For two days I
cooked inside the cabin while the man and his son scrambled around a
very steep pitched roof. Talk about a stimulus package. This team
spent much of their earnings on New Hampshire’s legal fireworks.
Lots of folks like metal roofs because often they can be installed
over an existing roof, which eliminates the need to add wasted asphalt
