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Which Color Of Shingles Is Best For Roofing

Does The Color Of Your Roofing Shingles Matter

What’s the best color for roofing shingles in Houston?

May 6, 2021 by Emmett Smith

Your roof affects your homes overall appeal, comfort and energy efficiency. When replacing it, one of the first things to consider is the color of shingles. It is something that you should not take lightly because its a long-term decision.

Keep on reading to find out why the shingle color of residential roofing systems matters.

Choosing The Right Roofer For The Job

No matter how much you spend on roofing materials, the project will only turn out well if you hire a great contractor. Finding a good contractor is the hardest part of home renovation projects for most homeowners. Nevertheless, its essential to find an honest, trustworthy professional contractor.

Talk to friends and family members to find a great local contractor. By asking for word-of-mouth referrals, youre less likely to end up dealing with an unscrupulous service provider.

Youre also more likely to find a trustworthy service provider if you stick to contractors in your community. Also, local contractors are familiar with municipal regulations. They also have established relationships with local suppliers and laborers.

As you search for a contractor, look for a service provider with a manufacturers designation. This accreditation indicates that a service provider has exceptional skills.

Resultantly, a brand is willing to stake its name on the credibility of that particular contractor. GAF, for instance, only awards the top 2% of roofing contractors in each market the status of Master Elite Contractor.

You should also check with the Better Business Bureau . The BBB keeps a record of consumer reviews about local service providers.

The organization also sponsors an accreditation program. A business must maintain fair and ethical business practices for an A+ rating with the BBB.

Consider Your Home’s Architectural Style

Different architectural building styles look best with different shingle colors and styles. For example, homes with natural wood siding in tree lined areas look best with deep forest green or brown shingles. For a beach house in light, breezy colors, install a light colored roof. Stucco sided homes are often complemented by rusty red or orange colored shingles. Stately and traditional homes tend to look best with a neutral, conservative roof.

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How To Choose The Right Roofing Shingles For Your Home

While it is not a science, knowing how to match roof shingles to house color can make a substantial difference with regard to overall aesthetics as well as indoor climate control. Roofing type, size and orientation should be taken into consideration when choosing the shingle color. Steeply pitched roofs, roofs with little surrounding vegetation or development and roofs on homes that are shorter will be the most visible for those who are looking for more discreet roofing combinations, choosing lighter shingle colors such as gray or brown may better suit the overall design scheme. Further, if minimizing thermal absorption is a concern, choosing lighter colors, even if cool roof shingle options are being used, will help to maximize solar reflection and lower overall energy usage.

Your Personal Style & Desired Aesthetic For Your Roof

Choosing the Right Color Shingles for Your Home  Crayon Roofings

Do you pick an unusual color for your neighborhood or do you go more traditional?

Check out what your neighbors have done and decide if you like it.

You need to also consider what is typical for your area and climate, along with any rules from your homeowners association or any similar types of community boards.

Using style boards and other tools to decide on the shade and material of your roof can be incredibly useful.

Roofing color charts are also readily available online so you can input the colors of your home and other factors and youll get a variety of options to consider.

While your personal aesthetic and desired look for your roof is the most important part of the roof placement puzzle, you should also be mindful of your neighborhood, even if you dont have an HOA or similar organization to deal with.

After all, they have to look at your house too, and if you live in a historic neighborhood or area with a specific style, you might be best served by sticking within those guidelines or that overall look and feel.

Whether it is because of the tradition in the area or because those roofing materials and shingle colors are best for the local weather and climate , there is probably a good reason and its worth at least thinking about before you make your final decision about your choice of a new roof.

Dont forget that your garage, shed, or other outbuildings will need a roof too!

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Choosing The Right Shingle Color For Your Home

For many homeowners looking to replace their shingle roof, choosing an asphalt shingle color choice can be very difficult. There are many factors to consider, including aesthetics, energy efficiency, the style and build of the home, and future home improvements.

If you’re a homeowner who is thinking about installing a new shingle roof, you have an important decision to make. There are thousands of different shingle colors, types and patterns to choose from. Here are some of the most common ways homeowners choose shingles for their new roof that complement their home.

Always Know The Building Codes

If you are going to buy your shingles yourself, it is imperative that you know your local building codes beforehand. Roofs are subject to some of the strictest residential codes and enforcement. There are rules governing how many nails each shingle must have, how much reveal a shingle can have, what kind of backer and adhesive a shingle can use, and more. All of these rules differ from state to state and sometimes from county to county. You do not want to put a roof on or even do a repair job and have it slapped down by the local code enforcement office. A mistake could cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Do not buy any shingles, especially in bulk, before you know that they meet all codes and regulations for your area.

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Light Brown Asphalt Shingles

If you want the roof to be highlighted by your neutral-colored home, choose light brown asphalt shingles. When our clients ask for a light brown roof, we often choose Owens Corning brown shingles, including the Owens Corning desert tan option, and GAF brown shingles, including the popular GAF shakewood shingles. In our experience, the best color combinations with light brown shingles include homes that are blue, green, white, terra cotta or taupe/beige.

Owens Corning Duration Desert Tan shingles

GAF Timberline HDZ Shakewood shingles

Consider The Natural Surroundings Of Your Home

How to Choose Roof Shingles – Tips on Picking the Right Color & Style

Is your house next to a lot of trees? Are you in the desert, or located near a lake? The natural colors surrounding your home play an important role in deciding the colors of your shingles and will make sure that your home pops – without looking out of place.

Desert landscapes have wonderful brown and red shades that can bring out your homes natural look. Image source: Envirogreen

If you have a desert home, using muted, light brown, and red tones plays with the natural surroundings and makes your home blend in with the surrounding beauty.

Light colors work best with the ocean in the background. Image source: Kimmel Studio

If you live by an ocean or lake, it is great to blend the earthy, sandy tones of light cream, yellows, blues, and light brown. This will give your home a relaxed feel and fit into the effortless landscape around it.

Darker tones make your home look perfectly in place in the woods. Image source: ACM Design

For a home in the mountains surrounded by trees, dark wooden tones play well with the landscape. Think of a log cabin or a sturdy home built in the clearings of the trees. Reds, browns, and black make your home stand out but dont take away from the stark greens surrounding you.

The suburbs offer a place for your home to be unique amongst its neighbors. Image source: Curbed

After you determine your homes aesthetic and natural surroundings, it is time to apply that to finding your shingle color.

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Shingle Colors That Compliment Gray Brick

Any shade of gray shingles will preserve the modern look of a gray brick home. Be careful with dark shingles because they tend to make your house look smaller. If you are worried that a gray-on-gray color scheme is too flat, check out CertainTeed’s Silver Birch shingles that will catch the sunlight and energize your gray brick facade.

How To Pick A Roof Shingle Color

Your roof shingle color should cohesively blend with your homes exterior coloring, as well as the natural landscape that surrounds it.

For instance, green shingles will look out of place in a desert landscape and light brown shingles might look odd surrounded by lush pine trees.

When determining the perfect color for your shingles, you should consider your homes:

  • Architectural style

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Shingle Roof Color Affects Snowmelt

If dark shingles have a reputation, part of it is that they are known for melting snow faster than light-colored shingles. This is because dark shingles absorb more heat, which leads to faster melting. However, you have to take into account that the winter months offer precious few hours of sunlight. Its important to note here that if you are leaning toward the darker colors for the purpose of melting snow off your roof faster, when the entire roof is covered in snow, there will be no dark colors to absorb the suns energy and those dark shingle qualities you were hoping to benefit from just wont happen.

Furthermore, if youre having issues with ice dams during the winter months, there is probably something going on in your attic that needs attention, such as sufficient airflow and improved insulation. Roofing specialists can remedy your ice dam situation to some degree, but its also necessary to address the internal concerns.

Your Roof & Your Homes Comfort

Choosing the Color of Roofing Shingles

The color of your roofing shingles will affect the temperature of your homes interior. A dark-colored roof absorbs more heat from the sun than a lighter-colored roof. The lighter the color of your shingles, the more they can reflect sunlight. However, a dark-colored roof may lose heat faster at night than a lighter-colored roof. Moreover, when selecting a roof color, you should always consider your location first.

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Shingle Roof Color Affects The Indoor Temperature

Roof color matters, particularly in your attic. For example, depending on the roof shingles colors, the temperature in your attic can vary by 20 to 40 degrees. For homes that receive little or no shade, choosing lighter asphalt roofing colors will help reflect sunlight off the roof and keep the temperatures lower, which will make cooling the house less expensive.

Dark shingles absorb more heat than light shingles. In colder climates, this is an advantage. Another perk to having dark shingles is that they also help to melt snow accumulation faster than light shingles. There are other factors that impact how the sun impacts the internal temperatures of your home. Metal roofs, as an example, are far more reflective than asphalt shingles. This means that should you have neutral colored shingles on your roof, it will be far less reflective than a dark colored metal roof.

When considering managing your indoor temperatures throughout the seasons, homeowners need to make the decision on what season requires more assistance that a specific color of shingles can offer. However, it must also be mentioned here that the quality of your insulation will also have a huge impact.

The Best Color Combinations For Your Roof And Siding

Matching your siding with your roof is important to boost your curb appeal and ensure your colors dont clash. But choosing the right colors can also be a tough decision to make, especially since it is hard to turn back once you start. Depending on the color of your siding, there are some suggested colors for your roof shingles that you should consider. Here are some of our favorite combinations from Sherwin Williams, to make it a little easier for you.

If your house is red, you should consider a darker hue roof color. Your shingles should be black or include shades of black, dark gray, dark brown, and dark green.

If your house is white, solid, and primary colors are your best bet. Depending on the style of your home and roof you can have everything from green to blue to red or black and gray roofs can look really nice with a white house. Adding some pops of color on the doors or shutters can help tie it all together.

One of the more common color combinations youll see in homes today is gray hue siding with a darker hue roof. If your siding is gray, consider a black, dark green, dark blue, darker gray, or even white roof.

In recent years, more people have been shifting towards blue siding for a more robust, unique look. A dark blue hue for your siding is beautiful and light accents really make it pop. So if your siding is blue, grays and whites can be your best color combo but a black or brown roof will also look very nice.

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Urban Heat Island Effect

Light-colored roofs can also lower the urban heat island effect, which causes metropolitan areas dense with concrete, buildings, and people to have a hotter temperature than the areas surrounding them. This effect is known for increasing air pollution levels and heat-related illnesses such as heat strokes. The urban heat island effect can also lead to strained energy resources due to the high cooling energy demand, further contributing to global warming.

Gaf Virtual Home Remodeler

What is the Best Roofing Color, Pairings & Most Popular

In addition to all of the stellar products, one of the reasons that Mid-Shore Exteriors partners with GAF is because of the numerous extras they provide to potential customers.

One of the best ways to find the perfect shingle color for your home is to use the GAF virtual home remodeler. This design software allows you to upload a picture of your current house and outfit it with all of the GAF shingle color possibilities.

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There Are Cheap And Local Providers Of Shingles That Do Not Assure Longevity

Great value according to a survey of 380 real estate agents and. While the best protection against heat loss and gain in your home is sufficient insulation, the color of the shingles can affect attic temperatures by 40 degrees. The most economical steel shingles that offer great value and long lasting service are manufactured by tamko.

Trending Roofing Materials For Your 2021 Re

When we speak to trends in roofing shingle colors, we are mostly talking about asphalt shingles which is the most commonly used material among homes today. However, there are a number of materials that people are shifting towards due to their ROI and lasting much longer.

On top of shifting to lighter shingle colors as an option, here is some different roofing materials that people are trending towards..

Metal roofing has had a recent resurgence in the housing market. Metal roofs can come in a few different forms, as sheets or even shingles that look like a regular shingled roof, but last for upwards of 50-75 years with little maintenance. They are very resistant to roof damage. Metal roofs are generally darker in color so work best with the combinations with green, gray, or black roofs we mention above.

Solar roofs have been growing each year due to their efficiency and in lieu of shifting towards more green energy sources. Solar roofs can have quite a great ROI over time depending on the size of your home and energy usage. Solar roofing panels can go with most home and roof types, and new designs have allowed them to blend in and get built right into your roofing.

Some other options for energy-efficient roofs include flat roofs with green roofs. If your home has a flat roof, installing a green roof can come with many benefits from managing rainwater to insulating your home. Theyre a great option for those looking for an alternative to basic roofing materials.

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Shingle Colors For White Brick

White brick exteriors truly go well with every CertainTeed shingle color available. Black shingles are an attractive option for white painted brick exteriors if you want a traditional, storybook look. Grey and silver shingles pair handsomely with white brick and create a cozy, cottage-inspired look. Also, shingle-alternatives to consider are wood shake shingles and CertainTeed’s faux slateHighland Slateshingles.

How Architecture Affects Your Roofing Options

4 Popular Roof Shingle Colors (&  Combinations) For 2021 : Secured ...

Certain types of materials and colors work better on different types of homes.

For instance, wooden shingles might look awkward on more modern homes, while a metal roof might be out of place on a classic Georgian, Queen Anne, Plantation, Colonial, or Victorian style home.

Brick homes or stone veneer homes tend to be better served by more classic looks, but stucco or frame homes might offer more room for experimentation in terms of roofing materials and roofing shingle colors.

Look at common choices for similar properties and typical colors and materials in your neighborhood for ideas.

Are there certain houses in your area that you love and are they similar to your own property? Take note of the types and materials that their roofs are made of and if the houses are similar to yours and consider using similar colors and materials.

The color of your roof shingles should be a secondary selection after you pick out the material.

You may be replacing your roof with a similar type of material as the previous one, or perhaps you are upgrading or making a stylistic change to your home or both.

Let your climate and the rest of your homes exterior elements guide you as well as the advice you get from your roofing contractors or architects and go from there in regard to the color of your roofing.

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