Mystery Roofing

Many, many moons ago I teased you all with a discussion about the Mystery Roofing and told you I would let you in on what it was soon.

I didn't. "Soon" didn't happen. Sorry about that, but you know how it is. I need to keep in mind that I shouldn't make promises life won't let me keep.

Anyway, the mystery roofing material will be revealed....here....today.

We live below a hill that has a quarry. They mine the greenish gray stuff that you see on shingles. It is actually a fiber, but I digress. We try to keep a good relationship with the management, etc, of the company, and they have done us the great favor of dropping several loads of their 'junk' stone at our house for us to use in landscaping. It is a pretty blue green hard stone with veins of quartz running through and they can't put it in the crusher. Score for us.
While Matt was up there once he noticed large rolls of used conveyor belt laying around. He asked if he could have one, they said fine and they dropped it off for us.

This is heavy duty thick stuff. Several layers of rubber close to 4' wide. Matt had the idea of using it as roofing material.

We unrolled it and measured out 25'. We only needed 24, but of course we wanted to have some flop over the side and we will trim it later.

Cutting it turned out to be WAY easier with a utility knife than with, say, a skill saw.

We rolled the strips and secured them with some old clothesline wire. We used Kubby the Kubota backhoe to get them to the roof. If we hadn't had that option I'm not sure how we would have done it, because these babies were *heavy*.

Matt and his dad snapped a chalk line and rolled them out, overlapping by a foot or so. We secured them with ceramic-coated screws, that way if one needs to be replaced all we need to do is unscrew it.

I was concerned with aesthetics, but I don't think it looks bad at all. We caulked under each overlap.

And from a distance....it looks like roof!

So, the screws were about $120, total, and the tar paper ran about $22/roll. The caulk was about $60 total. So, for around $300 we roofed the entire garage!