New Roof Re-Built Or Repaired?

Name: Joe City: Philadelphia

Question: I have a new intersecting gabled roof on top of an older gabled roof. On one side of the old roof under the new roof is a long, tightly installed 2x12 nailer board that the new rafters are attached to. On the other side of the older roof the nailer board is not tight and at the base of that nailer board there is at least a one inch gap between it and the old roof that gets tighter as the board goes up. You can easily see the nails underneath the nailer board being pulled up from the old roof and when I crawled up there I could look through the gap. The plywood roof seems to be installed OK. Before the roof was shingled rain would flood through that gap and into my new room addition. I wasn’t confident when they said that there was no problem with the gap but they shingled over it anyway without stabilizing that part of the roof. Later, I was told that the roof rafters on that side of the new roof were cut too short and that the roof framers had to pull up the nailer board so that they could attach the rafters, hence the gap beneath the nailer board and the soft roof at that place. After many weeks of asking for a written answer as to why that gap was not a problem and receiving nothing we came home to see a long 2x4 board in front of the jacked up nailer that only succeeded in blocking any view of the problem. Our contractor would not answer our question regarding that board as it appeared to us to be a clumsy attempt to hide the problem. Shouldn’t both nailer boards be flat and reasonably tight? After many weeks of stating that the gap in question was not a problem my contractor said he would shim and bolt the nailer board in question down tightly and add new rafters to the ones that were too short. I would like the entire roof to be rebuilt in that area and the shingling re-done, after all I paid a lot of money for a new roof not a newly fixed roof. Am I being unreasonable?

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