Cedar shake at the end of its life
For about twenty-five years, cedar shake was simply what a certain kind of house in this region got: the contemporaries and colonials that filled Fairfax, Reston, Vienna, Potomac and Bethesda from the late sixties into the eighties, along with a fair number around Columbia and outside Annapolis. Cedar weathers to gray and still looks right on those houses. It also has a service life, and most of the roofs in question have now spent thirty or forty years working through it.
- 1 Ridge caps. Thin, fully exposed, and the first course to lift.
- 2 The field. Granule loss is the honest measure of how much life is left.
- 3 Valleys. One channel taking the runoff of two slopes, all year round.
- 4 Flashing. At the chimney, and where the garage roof meets the wall of the house.
- 5 The vent boot. Small, rubber, and on a much shorter clock than everything around it.
- 6 Eaves. Where water that has backed up at the edge gets under the courses.
How a cedar roof actually gives out
It helps to know where these roofs actually are, because the answer is narrower than people expect. The contemporaries and colonials that took shake sit in a fairly specific band: Fairfax and the wooded Montgomery County streets around Bethesda, with a second pocket out toward Annapolis. On those houses the covering is part of the architecture, which is exactly why the replacement decision is harder here than it is on a shingled rancher.
Wood moves. A shake takes on water and swells, then dries and shrinks, and it does that every time the weather turns. Over decades the movement opens splits along the grain and lifts the edges into a cup, so the shake stops lying tight against the one below it and starts holding water instead of shedding it. What makes it confusing to judge is how uneven the process is: the south and west slopes go thin, gray and brittle under sun, while a north slope under canopy stays damp, grows moss, and rots rather than weathers. One plane can be finished while another has years in it.
The other half of the story is underneath. Shakes were laid over spaced boards, or over a solid deck with felt interlays between the courses, and where a roof has been letting water through slowly the boards take it first. Nobody grades that from the driveway. It is also the single thing most likely to move a replacement quote after the roof is opened, which is why the layer count and the condition of the deck belong in the conversation before the work is scheduled.
The treated ones have their own history
Not every shake roof of that era is the same product. Fire-retardant-treated shakes were specified across a number of communities during the eighties, and the treatments of the period did not all age gracefully. Some of those roofs deteriorated well ahead of untreated cedar, and several neighborhoods here dealt with the consequences collectively at the time. If your street had a shake replacement wave that seemed early for the age of the houses, that is usually the reason. It is worth establishing which product is on your own roof before drawing any conclusion from its age alone.
Repair, treatment, or the honest end
A shake roof has more genuine middle ground than an asphalt one. Individual shakes can be pulled and replaced, moss can be dealt with, and a roof at year twenty-five can often be given real additional time. What none of that can do is put flexibility back into wood that has gone brittle, or dry out a deck that has been wet for several winters. So the useful question to put to anyone offering to extend the roof is which of those two situations they believe you are in, and what they looked at to decide.
What replaces it, and why it is usually not cedar
Most of these roofs come off in favor of asphalt, and the reasons are practical rather than a matter of taste. The trade that installs cedar properly has thinned considerably in this region, the material has to be sourced and graded rather than ordered off a shelf, and a number of the planned communities that once required shake have since amended their covenants to permit substitutes.
That last point is the one that catches people. If your community still requires wood, or requires approval of what replaces it, that is a conversation to have with the architectural committee before quotes are in hand rather than after. And if the answer is that you are going back to cedar, the questions that actually matter are grade, thickness, and what goes underneath, not the price per square, which is the last thing that should be compared and usually the first thing that is.