The Chimney Cricket That Should Have Been There All Along
Most of this Woodside Drive roof sat at a 10/12 to 12/12 pitch. Seventeen and a half squares of it, out of twenty seven total. That’s steep enough that a crew works it on staging rather than walking it, and steep enough that everything takes longer, including the parts nobody sees from the driveway.
The part worth writing about is the chimney. It measured wider than 30 inches across the face parallel to the ridgeline, and it didn’t have a cricket behind it.
What a cricket does and why code requires one
A cricket is a small peaked structure built behind a chimney to split water and send it around both sides. Without one, the uphill face of the chimney becomes a dam. Water and debris pile against it, sit there, and work their way into the flashing joint over years. Residential code requires a cricket when the chimney’s dimension parallel to the ridge is greater than 30 inches and it doesn’t intersect the ridgeline. This chimney qualified on both counts.
Plenty of older Brentwood homes have chimneys in exactly this condition, flashed adequately and drained badly, and it never announces itself until a ceiling stain shows up in an upstairs bedroom. The replacement was the right moment to correct it, so a saddle went in behind the chimney along with new large-format flashing at 32 by 60 inches.
Steep pitch changes the whole job
Seventeen and a half squares at 10/12 to 12/12, another three and a half at 7/12 to 9/12, and seven squares two stories or greater. Ten additional roofer hours were written into the scope for site conditions and limited access, which on a house like this means material staging and getting a crew safely onto the steep faces rather than anything exotic.
A single fixed skylight came out and went back in. Skylights are where roofs fail years later, almost always because somebody reused the old flashing kit to save an hour. That one gets replaced as a matter of course on our Brentwood roof replacements.
Complete scope:
- Tear off and disposal of laminated composition shingles (27.44 SQ)
- New laminated composition shingles (29 SQ)
- 15 lb roofing felt (25.96 SQ) and roll roofing (1.48 SQ)
- Universal asphalt starter course (356.90 LF)
- Hip and ridge cap, standard profile (104.29 LF)
- Drip edge (356.90 LF)
- Continuous shingle-over ridge vent (52 LF)
- Turtle-type metal roof vent (1 EA) and power attic vent cover (1 EA)
- Pipe jack flashings, primed and painted (5 EA)
- Step flashing (102 LF)
- Galvanized L flashing (23 LF)
- Chimney flashing, 32″ x 60″ (1 EA)
- Chimney saddle / cricket, 26 to 50 SF (1 EA)
- Fixed skylight, 7.1 to 9 SF, removed and replaced (1 EA)
- Aluminum gutter (131 LF) and downspout (133 LF)
- High grade gutter guard and screen (131 LF)
- Window screens (6 EA) and window reglazing
Ventilation the roof didn’t have before
Fifty two feet of continuous shingle-over ridge vent went on, alongside a turtle vent. Mixing vent types on one roof is usually a mistake because they compete and short-circuit airflow, but the layout here has separated roof planes, which makes the combination reasonable rather than sloppy. Attic ventilation is the quietest driver of shingle lifespan there is, and it’s the thing homeowners think about least when they’re comparing bids on a hail damage replacement.
Gutters came off and went back on, 131 feet of it, with matching high grade guard and 133 feet of downspout. Hail that bruises shingles dents aluminum on the way past, and gutter guard screen is thin enough that it rarely survives a storm the roof didn’t. Handling it in the same mobilization is standard on our Brentwood gutter work.
Two days, late August
Work started on a Monday and finished Tuesday. Two days on twenty seven squares reads slow until you account for the pitch, the cricket framing, the skylight and better than a hundred feet of step flashing, which is hand work that doesn’t speed up no matter how many people you put on it.
The supplement went to the carrier with photo documentation on every added line, which is how the cricket and the flashing got paid rather than argued about. If a storm has been through your part of town and you want somebody to actually look behind the chimney, our insurance claims team handles that read, and we work Brentwood constantly.