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Roof replacement, repair and hail claim help for Englewood, Colorado.
Plank Decking: What Is Under Most 1950s Englewood Roofs
Tear the shingles off almost any pre-1960 house in Englewood and you will not find plywood. You will find planks: individual boards, usually one-by-six or one-by-eight, nailed across the rafters when the house was built. With a median year built of 1955, that describes most of the city. Plank decking is not a defect. It is a different material with its own habits, and roofers who understand those habits write better bids.
What Plank Roof Decking Is and Why Englewood Houses Have It
Before sheet goods took over residential construction, carpenters decked roofs with sawn boards laid across the rafters, tight or with small gaps, nailed at every crossing. Plywood did not become the residential standard until the 1960s, and OSB came later still. Englewood's housing boom came earlier: roughly 44 percent of the city's homes went up between the 1940s and 1960s, compact bungalows and ranches filling the grid on both sides of Broadway. Those roofs were planked, and most still are. Boards that stayed dry for seventy years are often in remarkable shape, because old-growth lumber is dense and straight-grained in a way modern framing stock is not.
How Board Decking Behaves Differently From Plywood and OSB
Boards move as individuals. Each one shrinks, swells, and cups on its own, so an old plank roof is never the flat, uniform plane new sheathing gives you. The differences that matter show up at nailing time:
- Gaps. Boards were often laid with spacing, and decades of shrinkage widen it. A shingle nail driven into a gap holds nothing. Roofers call these misses shiners, and every plank roof produces some.
- Cupping and crowning. A cupped board telegraphs through shingles as a visible ripple line across the slope.
- Knots and splits. Dry lumber splits near board ends, and loose knots can drop out entirely, leaving holes a nail cannot bridge.
- Decades of patches. Old repairs leave odd board widths and the occasional plywood scab, each with its own nailing quirks.
None of this rules out re-roofing over boards. It means the nailing has to hit wood, by a crew replacing whatever cannot hold a fastener.
Re-Roof Over Boards or Re-Sheet With OSB: An Honest Answer
If the boards are sound, tight, and mostly flat, roofing directly over them is legitimate and common. Wholesale re-sheeting, overlaying the boards with OSB or plywood, is the right call in three situations: gaps wide enough that too many nails would land in air, cupping widespread enough to show through architectural shingles, or rot and splitting spread across whole slopes rather than a few boards.
Re-sheeting adds real material and labor cost, so treat a bid that includes it as a claim that needs evidence, meaning photos of the conditions that justify it. Treat a bid that assumes perfect boards sight unseen with equal suspicion.
Skip Sheathing Under Old Shake Conversions: The Case That Always Needs Work
Some Englewood roofs were originally built for wood shakes, and shakes were installed over skip sheathing: boards laid with deliberate gaps of several inches so the shakes could dry from below. When those roofs were later converted to asphalt shingles, someone had to close the gaps, and not everyone did it well.
Asphalt shingles cannot span open gaps; they need continuous decking under every course. If your roof started life under shakes, expect tear-off to reveal either an old infill job of varying quality or open skip sheathing that must be overlaid before a single shingle goes down. This is the one plank scenario where decking work is not a maybe, so make sure it is priced before the job starts.
Price Decking Work in Writing Before Tear-Off, Not After
Nobody can see every board through the shingles, and plenty of Englewood roofs hide their decking under two layers (our two-layer tear-off guide covers that discovery). Decking condition is revealed at tear-off, on the day your roof is open to the sky. That timing is exactly why pricing has to be settled earlier.
An honest bid states a per-board and per-sheet price for decking replacement in writing before work starts, plus how much, if any, the base price includes. The bad pattern is the opposite: a low bid, an open roof at noon, and a surprise number you have no room to negotiate. The code expectation is simple, fasteners must hold in sound wood, so rotten boards were always getting replaced. What you agree on in advance is the unit price.
What We Photograph at Tear-Off So You See What You Paid For
Our crews photograph every slope after tear-off and every board we replace, before underlayment covers the work. You get the photos in a written report: the gap that took a filler strip, the split board beside the chimney, the shiners left over from the last roof. If we recommend re-sheeting, the photos make the case. If the boards are sound, the photos say that too, and you keep the money. It is the same habit as our documented inspections, applied to the one day the roof can actually be seen.
Plank Roof Decking FAQs
- Can you put new shingles over plank decking? Yes, when the boards are sound, reasonably flat, and free of wide gaps. Old-growth boards hold nails well. The crew has to nail with care, since gaps and knots produce misses that plywood does not, and boards that are rotten, split, or badly cupped get replaced or overlaid with new sheathing first.
- Does plank decking need to be replaced with plywood? Not automatically. Re-sheeting is justified by conditions: wide gaps, widespread cupping, spreading rot, or open skip sheathing left from an old shake roof. On many 1950s Englewood roofs, replacing a handful of bad boards is all that is needed. Ask for tear-off photos showing the conditions before paying for a full overlay.
- How much decking repair should I budget on a 1950s Englewood roof? Most re-roofs on sound plank decks need only a few boards replaced, while skip-sheathed shake conversions can need a full overlay. Get the per-board and per-sheet price in writing before tear-off, along with any allowance the base bid includes. That converts an unknowable condition into a known unit price.
Wondering what is under your shingles? A free documented inspection reads your decking from the attic and the roof surface, photos included. Call (720) 907-1193, use our contact page, or see how decking work fits a full roof replacement.