By Mark Clement
Skylights are an obvious benefit to many remodels. The natural light and open area they create makes spaces feel bigger. In some applications (such as this one in an attic renovation) they actually make the space bigger by adding some headroom. And correctly positioned skylights create views from inside your customers otherwise wouldn't have.
But whether you're cutting into a porch roof or into an occupied home, you just don't hack out a hole and drop a skylight in. Preparation is the key to quality, while understanding installation techniques becomes a tool for creating bigger, brighter places (that, not incidentally, are leak-free) and/or working an up-sell.
Prep: The Basics
I see four major challenges in prepping for skylights: safety, layout, moving the units, and cutouts. I review each with any crew member who doesn't have demonstrated roof and ladder experience before getting into actual installation.
Getting there. Plan a safe route up and down from the roof and create a safe, stable work area on the roof. This is easily accomplished by setting ladders up properly and using roof brackets and a walk board topside. (See Figures 1 and 2.)
Interior layout. Skylights must be positioned properly along the rafters for optimum aesthetics. Usually you have to think about the skylight shaft as part of this process, but the units we installed (Velux VS606 manually operable skylights) require no shaft; instead we'll trim them to match the existing package.
Moving the units. The skylights we used in this project are what my roofers call "4-by-4s", i.e. they're about 4 feet by 4 feet. That's a lot of glass, which makes them big, heavy and tough to move. Fortunately smart design (the glass is removable) made things easier. Store the glass in a safe place. We leaned ours against a wall and covered it with a sheet of drywall to prevent a really expensive break.
Tying in. Tying the skylight flashing into the existing roof system without tearing out and destroying piles of old three-tab shingles was a challenge. By cutting back the shingles and weaving in the flashing parts, I was able to integrate the skylight flashing with minimal invasion and demo (more on this in Part 2).
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