Roofing Contractors in Saugus, MA

The layer hiding under your shingles

You cannot keep stacking asphalt forever, and even where a recover is technically allowed it is usually the wrong call on these houses. A second layer buries the deck. Nails have to punch through old shingles to reach planks that went down seventy years ago, and a nail that only bites the top half of a board will work its way back out. The extra weight sits on rafters sized in 1955. Worst of all, when water finally shows up on a bedroom ceiling, nobody can trace it, because there are two roofs between the leak and the stain.

So on most Saugus houses we strip to the boards and show you the bad planks on the deck before we cover anything. If you are still deciding whether you are there yet, our breakdown of roof repair versus replacement in Massachusetts lays out the honest markers.

Capes in Lynnhurst, Pleasant Hills and Golden Hills

The story-and-a-half cape is the single biggest ice dam generator in this region, and Saugus is full of them. Bedrooms sit directly under the deck. Insulation got shoved into the eave decades ago and closed off the only air path the roof ever had. Warm deck up high, frozen edge down low, and every February you get a ridge of ice sitting on the gutter line.

Our winters run about 92 days at or below 32 degrees but only about 23 that never climb above freezing. That 69-day gap is the melt-and-refreeze cycle doing the damage. We treat the cause with attic ventilation and insulation work - baffles at the soffit, a continuous ridge vent, air sealing at the ceiling plane - instead of selling you heat cable. When a dam is already pushing water under the shingles in January, we handle ice dam removal with steam, never by chipping at it.

Every asphalt reroof we do here carries an ice barrier running from the roof edge to at least 24 inches inside the exterior wall line. On slopes of 8:12 or steeper, which covers a lot of the older gables around Saugus Center, it also has to extend at least 36 inches measured along the slope. Design ground snow load in Saugus is 40 psf, verified from the 780 CMR Eighth Edition table, and worth confirming with the town building official on anything structural.

Cliftondale and East Saugus two-families

These blocks do not read like the rest of town. They read like Malden or the near edge of Lynn: two and three-family houses set close, three stories of staging, rear porch stacks blocking the wall you want to work from, and a driveway barely wide enough for the dumpster. Most of them have a flat or near-flat rear ell tied into the pitched main roof. That joint is where four previous crews left roof cement. We terminate the membrane under the shingle course with metal instead.

Wind on the hills, trees on the north side

Golden Hills and Bristow sit up above the Saugus River basin with real open exposure. Ridge caps and starter courses go first up there, so we run six nails per shingle and a starter strip with a factory adhesive line. North Saugus and Oaklandvale have the opposite problem: heavy tree cover off Breakheart, limb strikes, valleys packed with leaves, moss on the north slope. Old brick chimneys are the constant on both sides of town, and honest chimney flashing repair fixes more Saugus ceilings than new shingles do.

Low-slope work along Route 1

The strip running north from the Belden G. Bly Bridge past the Kowloon and the leaning tower at Prince is almost entirely flat and low-slope roofing. Restaurants, showrooms and retail with rooftop units, curbs, and drains that pond after every heavy rain. We do that side of the work too. EPDM, TPO and PVC each have a place, and the deck condition plus the rooftop equipment usually decide which one. More on that on our commercial roofing page.

Permits, credentials and what it costs

A Saugus reroof is permitted by the Saugus Building Department at Town Hall. Fees and submission requirements are set by the town, and we file the application along with the certificate of liability insurance and the workers' compensation affidavit. A homeowner should never be asked to pull the permit for a licensed crew. The Construction Supervisor License is the license of record on that permit; the Home Improvement Contractor registration is the consumer-protection side. We provide both with every estimate, and you can verify a registration free on the state's licensee list.

A full tear-off on a Saugus cape or ranch is usually a two-day job. Two-family work in Cliftondale runs longer because of the staging. The number depends on square footage, how many boards we replace and how much venting we add, and we put it in writing after we walk the roof.