Roofing Contractors in Watertown, MA

Where Watertown roofs actually leak

It is almost never the main hip. These houses carry a rear ell over the kitchen and back stairs, and that ell is flat or close to it. Two low-slope surfaces on a house everyone calls pitched.

• The rear ell deck, where water ponds against an old lap seam.
• The joint where that ell dies into the main wall, cemented instead of flashed.
• The porch roof, and the boards behind its gutter return.
• Chimney flashing tarred over instead of replaced in metal.

We take the low-slope sections down to clean sheathing, correct pitch toward the drain edge, and run single-ply membrane with metal terminations. Our flat roof replacement in Boston page covers EPDM versus TPO.

Two layers already on the deck

Tear-off here is arithmetic, not an upsell. Two layers is the cap, and the second one hides every soft board underneath. We replace bad planks by the board. Then the ice barrier: roof edge to at least 24 inches inside the exterior wall line, 36 inches along the slope on anything 8:12 or steeper. That is Massachusetts ice and water shield code, not preference.

Brick blocks, Mount Auburn Street and Arsenal Yards

Watertown Square holds 1920s three-story brick apartment blocks. Low-slope roof behind a parapet, coping on top, scuppers or an interior drain. Water enters at the coping joints and runs inside the brick, so the ceiling stain is nowhere near the hole. Chimney and roof flashing repair fixes more of those than a new membrane.

Commercial too: Mount Auburn Street storefronts, Arsenal Yards on the old Watertown Arsenal site, institutional low-slope near the Perkins School for the Blind. All commercial roofing work, scheduled around business hours.

Ice dams over a finished attic

Finished attics in East Watertown usually have insulation jammed against the rafters and no eave path left. This area sees about 92 days a year at or below 32 degrees, but only about 23 that stay below freezing all day. That gap is the melt-refreeze cycle that builds a dam at your cold eave. Attic ventilation and insulation work treats the cause.

Permits, snow load and where the dumpster goes

Your permit comes from the Watertown Building Department. We file it with the liability certificate and the workers' comp affidavit. Design ground snow load here is 40 psf, verified from the 780 CMR Eighth Edition table; confirm it with the building official on anything structural. More on that in how much snow a Massachusetts roof can hold. No driveway on most blocks, so the dumpster needs a street permit. We arrange it.

Price swings on square footage, how much sheathing is bad, and whether the flat ell is in scope. We put it in writing after we walk the roof. Near a town line, we also cover roofing in Cambridge and Newton roof repair.