Camp and cottage roofing in Maine

The unattended-building problem

An unheated camp is a strange case in roof physics, better off in one way and worse in another. Better: ice dams are caused by heat escaping a warm interior, melting the snow blanket from below so it refreezes at the cold eaves (BSC ice dam digest), and a building with no heat has little heat to lose, so the classic dam cycle mostly never starts. Worse: without that same heat, nothing melts the snowpack between storms. The roof holds everything winter delivers, storm on storm, and Maine winters deliver plenty; the 2015 Mainely Trusses advisory listing puts ground snow loads at 50 pounds per square foot on the coast and a statewide top of 100 psf up north (2015 advisory listing). And nobody is there to shovel, or to notice a sag, a leak, or a limb through a panel until the ice goes out.

That combination is close to a written argument for metal. A self-shedding roof takes the accumulating-load problem and quietly solves it every time the sun works on the panels, no occupant required. The mechanics of shedding, retention, and eave details are covered in the snow and ice dam guide.

• Nobody sees the problem

  A year-round house reports its own trouble: a drip, a stain, a cold room. A closed-up camp keeps quiet from October to May. The roof has to be the kind that does not need watching.

• The snow stays all winter

  With no heat below, snow does not melt off between storms. Whatever falls, accumulates, and the structure carries it until spring unless the roof sheds it on its own.

• Help is far away

  A February problem at the end of an unplowed camp road is not getting fixed in February. The realistic repair window is May to November, which is one more argument for a roof that fails rarely and slowly.

Standing seam for the camp, screw-down for the shed

Camp properties are usually little compounds: the main camp, a bunkhouse, a woodshed, an outhouse, maybe a boathouse. It is honest, not cheap, to roof them differently. Exposed-fastener panels, the classic screw-down metal roof, are common on Maine outbuildings for good reason: economical, quick to install, and plenty of roof for a structure that shelters firewood. Their known tradeoff is the fasteners themselves, hundreds of gasketed screws through the panel face that age and work loose over years of freeze-thaw, which makes them a maintenance item.

On the main camp, that tradeoff reads differently. A maintenance item on a building nobody visits all winter is a leak with a head start. Concealed-fastener standing seam puts nothing through the weather surface, which is precisely the quality an unattended building wants, and it sheds snow at least as well. If the camp is wearing old asphalt now, the metal roof replacement page walks the tear-off decision, which on camps often uncovers board sheathing and older framing that deserves a look while the roof is open.

Camp road realities

Roofing a camp is partly a logistics job. Standing seam panels run eave to ridge in single lengths, and long panels need a delivery truck that can make the corners on a narrow gravel road, or a plan to ferry material the last stretch. Mud season closes soft roads to heavy trucks in spring, and nobody wants a half-finished roof when the weather turns in the fall, so the practical season is a real window, not the whole calendar. None of this is a problem for a professional who works camp country regularly; all of it is worth raising in the first conversation, along with parking, staging space, and whether a crew can reach the site daily or needs to plan around the distance.

Camp country is most of Maine, but three regions carry the bulk of it: the Lakes Region, where cottage clusters ring the big lakes, the western mountains, where snow loads run heaviest, and Downeast Maine, where shorefront cottages add the saltwater metal question on top of everything else. For how the coastal wrinkle changes the material choice, and for the statewide picture generally, see the Maine Metal Roofing Guide.

Roof it once, then forget it

The point of a camp is that it asks little of you. A roof that needs inspection every spring, or another round of shingles down the road, works against that. The camps that get metal roofs tend to be the ones whose owners got tired of wondering what they would find at ice-out. Put the roof question to rest properly and the building goes back to being the simplest thing you own.

One practical addition while the crew is there: if snow sliding off the camp roof lands where people walk in spring and fall, or onto a lower porch roof, snow retention over those spots is cheap to add during installation and annoying to add later. The camp version of the question is simpler than the year-round version, because for most of the winter nobody is underneath, but the entry you use in March deserves the same protection a house entry gets.