Don't worry it's not contagious. Just messy. Many OLD houses out here in CO have these wooden shake shingles. They are just messy to remove, hard to upkeep and ugly after 100 years. The old wooden shakes were typically western red cedar and possess a low ignition temperature of approximately 378 degrees. Cigarettes are about 550 degrees!
Don't get me wrong, I love shake and today's manufacturers of shake shingles for siding and roofs are fire rated, R rated, impact rated and just architecturally pleasing. The new roofs of today are clean and easy to repair while certainly functional.
Day 9 Progress: more roof down, garage secured, kitchen cabinets out, bulk order to HD for bid
Below garage before........................and garage now!
FYI some light reading....Quirky little word detective says this about shingles:
Dear Word Detective: I cannot find the origin of the word "shingles" as it is used in the medical sense. It is the zoster virus, and called "chicken pox" in children. In adults, they call it "shingles," and I am crazy to know how that came to be. Help! -- Ivy.
Good question. And what, if anything, does the disease "shingles" have to do with the sort of shingles on your roof? And why, while we're at it, did the guys who fixed our roof last week replace gray shingles with lime green shingles, making our roof look as though it had been hit by a large guacamole meteorite? OK, that's probably one of those unanswerable puzzles, but we can start with the other two.
There are actually three separate "shingle" words in English ("shingles," the disease, occurs only in the plural form).
The "roof tile" sort of "shingle" derives from the Latin "scindula," a late form of "scandula," which meant "roof tile." That's not a terribly exciting derivation, but "scandula" did probably come from the verb "scandere," meaning "to ascend" and from which, in fact, we also got "ascend" and "descend." Roof shingles, if properly installed (ahem), appear to "ascend" the roof in neat little rows.
The second sort of "shingle" is less often heard and means "loose pebbles or small stones on a seashore or beach." This "shingle" is a collective noun, the singular form referring to an aggregation of such stones, not the individual stones themselves. This "shingle" is also sometimes used to mean just "pebbly beach," and is thought to derive from one of the Scandinavian languages, possibly the Norwegian "singl," meaning "gravel."
"Shingles," the disease, is indeed caused by the zoster virus, which also causes chicken pox, and "shingles" is usually caused by reactivation of the virus in someone, usually an adult who has already had chicken pox as a child. Shingles is an extremely painful disease, causing a blistering rash, usually on the chest and/or back, and can last for months. The name "shingles" derives from the Latin "cingulum," meaning "girdle," referring to the fact that the painful rash of shingles can encircle the sufferer's torso like a girdle.
While we're on the subject, "chicken pox" has nothing to do with chickens, although there is some uncertainty about the origin of the name. It may be that "chicken" was meant in the sense of "mild or harmless" as compared to deadly smallpox, but some sources posit that the resemblance of the bumpy rash to chickpeas under the skin gave the disease its name
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