Two roofs, one house
Plenty of Austin homes are really two roofs wearing one address: a steep second-story roof doing the classic shingle job, and a lower first-story roof that catches everything the upper one sheds — water, leaves, and whatever the live oaks overhead decide to drop. Putting the same material on both is the easy answer. It’s rarely the right one.
On this Tarrytown home we split the system to match the conditions. The second-story roof was torn off and re-shingled in CertainTeed Landmark architectural shingles in Georgetown Gray, with matching caps carried across the hips and ridges and every vent reflashed into the new field. The first-story roof got the tougher assignment: 24-gauge standing seam metal in dark bronze over a fully self-adhered underlayment, so the surface that takes the runoff and the debris load sheds both for decades — and looks sharp doing it against the gray shingle field above.
Water handling got the same attention as the roof itself. We hung all-new gutters and fitted every run with LeafBlaster Pro stainless micro-mesh gutter guards — the fine mesh that keeps out not just leaves but the oak tassels that slip straight through cheap screens and turn Tarrytown gutters into planters every spring.
The result is a roof system matched to how this house actually weathers: shingles where shingles excel, metal where the abuse is, and gutters that stay open without a ladder in the garage on standby.
