Roofing Contractors in Charlestown, MA

What a Charlestown roof is actually made of

On a rowhouse block you are usually buying two roofs at once. The visible face is slate or flat-lock copper over board sheathing. Behind it sits a low-slope deck that drains to an internal leader or a built-in gutter cut into the cornice. We handle both halves: slate roof repair in Boston on the street side and flat roof replacement on the deck behind it.

• Board sheathing, not plywood, with gaps that swallow fasteners and telegraph through thin underlayment
• Parapet caps in stone, brick or metal that leak at the joint long before the field does
• Built-in gutters lined in copper or membrane, hidden inside the cornice where a failure rots the framing before it shows inside
• Clustered brick chimneys with cracked crowns and step flashing that was tarred over instead of replaced
• Shared roof planes and near-zero side setbacks, so your reroof gets detailed into both neighbors

That last point is the one people underestimate. On a continuous Charlestown block the termination at each party wall is the weak point, and doing it right means chimney and roof flashing repair with new counterflashing reglet-cut into the brick, not caulk over the old lead.

The Navy Yard is a commercial roof on a residential address

The 19th-century granite and brick buildings on the Navy Yard side were converted to residential, but the roofs never stopped being industrial. Large single-ply membrane fields, mechanical curbs, elevator penthouses, and drainage designed for a warehouse rather than a condo. Those decks get scoped as commercial roofing, because that is what they are, and the association usually needs a phased plan rather than one shutdown.

Harbor exposure: fasteners matter here

City Square, the Navy Yard and the Little Mystic waterfront all sit within about 3,000 feet of saltwater, which is the range where FEMA coastal guidance recommends 300-series stainless fasteners. Hot-dipped galvanized is the practical minimum anywhere in 02129. Copper nails stay standard for slate and cedar.

Wind is the other half of it. Charlestown catches open fetch off the Mystic and the Inner Harbor, funneled hard around the Tobin Bridge approach and Sullivan Square. Ridge caps and perimeter edge metal need mechanical attachment rated for that exposure, not adhesive alone.

Permits and design review in 02129

Charlestown is Boston, so a residential reroof with no structural work goes through the ISD Short-Form Permit. The fee is $20 for the application plus $10 per $1,000 of the work estimate. We file the trade license front and back, the Certificate of Liability Insurance, the Workers' Comp Affidavit, your signed contract, the Site Safety Plan Affidavit and the Mattocks-Higgins Affidavit. Our walkthrough of the Boston short-form roof permit process covers what the homeowner actually has to sign.

Honest answer on historic review

Charlestown is not one of Boston's local historic districts. The Boston Landmarks Commission list runs Historic Beacon Hill, the Back Bay Architectural District, the South End Landmark District, Bay Village, Fort Point Channel and a handful of architectural conservation districts. Charlestown is on the National Register instead, and a National Register listing does not by itself trigger design review on a private reroof.

Two things change that. If your building carries an individual Boston Landmark designation, or you are inside the Navy Yard where preservation covenants ride with the redevelopment, exterior work is reviewed. In that case Landmarks approval has to be in hand before Inspectional Services will issue the permit, not after. The BLC is at 617-635-1935. We make that call before anyone orders slate.

Snow, ice and the 40 psf number

Boston, and therefore Charlestown, carries a design ground snow load of 40 psf in the 780 CMR Eighth Edition table. Confirm the current value with the building official on any structural job. Boston averages 49.2 inches of snow a year, and the winter of 2014-15 delivered 110.6 inches at Logan. Low-slope decks behind parapets do not shed. They hold, drift and refreeze.

The freeze-thaw cycle does the real damage. Boston sees about 92 days a year at or below 32 degrees but only around 23 that stay frozen all day. That gap works meltwater into chimney crowns, mortar joints and slate every single winter. On the pitched sections we run the ice barrier the code requires: at least 24 inches inside the exterior wall line, and 36 inches along the slope on anything 8:12 or steeper. The detail is explained in our note on the Massachusetts ice and water shield requirement, and when a dam has already formed we do ice dam removal in Boston by steam, never by chipping.

Working the neighborhood

We stage tight and clean up daily, because on a Charlestown street there is nowhere to leave a mess. Slate and clay tile always come off rather than getting overlaid, which the code requires and which also lets us see the sheathing. We work the same way across the Mystic for roofing in Everett and Somerville and across the harbor for East Boston roof repair, so scheduling around a bridge closure is routine.