I was redoing the roof on my house, and I had some family over helping me do that.

For context, I live in a geodesic dome home, and so it’s not as simple as scrape off old roof, slap on new roof, you also have to account for the angles of the hundreds of triangles that comprise the roof.

Further, instead of using a cedar shake, which was what was already on there, I decided to use an aluminum shake. The main reason was cost. Cedar shake was going to cost about $10 a square foot, whereas aluminum shake only cost me about $1 a square foot.

Even though my home is 2600 square foot and in a normal flat roof house that would mean you would have somewhere between 2600 and 3000 square foot to cover because it’s a dome, it curves, you have a lot more wastage and so I was looking at buying about 4000 square foot of shake.

Going aluminum extended the lifespan of the roof from a 25 year to a 50 year, which is nice, and also cut $30,000 out of the cost.

However…

Once we got the old roof off, my family members decided that they didn’t want to do this anymore, and they left.

So I had to, all of a sudden, call around and find someone else to help me install the roof.

You remember that $30,000 I saved buying aluminum shake instead of cedar shake?

That’s what it cost for me to get the aluminum shake installed after the old roof had been peeled off, not counting what I paid my family members for the help that they did provide in the interim.