Roofing Contractors in Somerville, MA

Low-slope decks: EPDM, TPO and modified bitumen

A Somerville two-family usually has a shallow hip that reads as flat from the sidewalk. Water does not run off it. It sits, finds a weak lap seam and shows up on a third-floor ceiling at the far end of the house. We strip to sound sheathing, correct pitch toward the drain, and set single-ply membrane with welded seams. See EPDM, TPO and PVC flat roofs for the choice and flat roof replacement for the build; the larger decks at Assembly Row are commercial roofing work.

No driveway, no side yard

Almost every street here is resident-permit parking, and most of these houses have no driveway. A dumpster and a staging zone need a street occupancy permit from the city, with the spaces posted before the truck arrives. We handle that.

• Six to ten feet to the neighbor's wall: the ladder lands on someone else's grass, so we knock first.
• Rear porch stacks block the back elevation, often the only wall with room to work from.
• We magnet-sweep both yards and the sidewalk every day, not just at the end.

Two layers is the limit

The code caps you at two layers. Plenty of Somerville buildings took an overlay decades ago and sit at that limit now, so the next roof is a tear-off. Slate can never be roofed over at all. If the leak is local and the deck is sound, we quote a roof repair instead.

Ice dams on a finished third floor

Third floors were finished decades after the roofs went on. Insulation got jammed against the rafters, the eave path closed, and heated rooms now sit under a cold deck. Boston sees about 92 days a year at or below 32 degrees but only 23 that stay below it all day. That gap is the melt-refreeze cycle that builds ice at your cold eave. We fix the cause with attic ventilation and insulation work, not heat cable, and every asphalt reroof gets an ice barrier at least 24 inches inside the exterior wall line, as 780 CMR requires. More in our guide to preventing ice dams.

The hills: Spring Hill, Prospect Hill and Powder House

Around Prospect Hill Tower and Nathan Tufts Park the stock changes: mansard faces, dormer cheeks and long valleys. Those want real sheet metal at the valleys and chimney, not roof cement, and chimney flashing repair is our most common call up there. Somerville runs its own Historic Preservation Commission. In a local district, review goes through the city, not the Boston Landmarks Commission.

Permits and snow load

A reroof with no structural work goes through Somerville's own building department, on the city's fee schedule. We pull it and file the liability certificate and workers' comp affidavit. Design ground snow load here is 40 psf, from the 780 CMR Eighth Edition table; confirm it with the building official on anything structural.

We cross the line constantly for Cambridge roofing and Medford roof repair, so if you own near Beacon Street or the Mystic, we are close by.