Remember when I said there was water pouring in through the roof the day we closed on the house?

Dad and Blaine patching a leak the day we closed

The good news is that we got it all patched up and water no longer leaks inside the house when it rains.

The bad news is that when taking apart the front porch earlier this spring, we discovered that water is now leaking in through the front porch ceiling.  🙁

We were planning to keep the same asphalt roof on for as long as possible to delay the inevitable cost of replacing it. But with the issue continuing to persist, we decided to bite the bullet and completely overhaul it now too.

Old asphalt shingles coming off, 2015

Asphalt Source

Slate  Source

Metal on an 1816 Federal style farmhouse Source (and great blog btw)

Source

Our Houston church wears a metal roof

A steel standing seam metal roof is what we chose for its lighter weight, durability, cost, and look.  Hopefully this will be the only roof we install on the house in our lifetime!

As for color, it will be a silvery raw metal kind of look.

We took some advice from this great read, and chose a light color as to not compete with the dark siding.

Another bonus is that a metal roof will act like a Faraday cage around our house. According to this, lightning strikes will be dispersed over a larger area as compared to a skimpy little wire coming down the sides of the structure. A metal roof will also intercept 100% of the lightning that comes towards the house, unlike a lightning rod which only intercepts the lightning that happens to hit the rod.

If this is true, then it’s great news for us because lighting strikes are quite common on Hannah’s Hill. Since we bought the house almost 10 months ago, so far two trees in the pasture have been hit by lighting and also a cow! Poor thing. 

Grandma installed lighting rods with grounding cables on every structure on the property.

Grounding cable on garage

So we’ll see if our new metal roof does us some good.