Roof replacement in Thornbury

On a house that has been roofed six or seven times over its life, the interesting part of the job is the deck. Older Thornbury homes frequently have plank sheathing rather than plywood, sometimes with gaps between boards, and often with a century of fastener holes in it. Some of that is perfectly serviceable. Some of it is not, and you cannot know which until the old roof is off.

We quote deck repair at a stated per-sheet rate up front so that the number you get at the end is one you agreed to. What we will not do is give you a low headline price on the assumption the deck is fine and then present a large adjustment once the roof is open, which is a common enough practice that it is worth asking any roofer about directly.

Where plank sheathing is sound but uneven, overlaying it properly gives modern shingles the flat, continuous nailing surface they need. That is an added cost and it is sometimes genuinely necessary. We will show you the deck and explain why, rather than asserting it from the driveway.

Century homes accumulate additions, and each one meets the original roof somewhere. Re-roofing these means dealing with more valleys, more roof-to-wall junctions, more changes of pitch and more chimneys than a modern house has, and every one of those is a place water can get in if the detail is rushed.

This is where the difference between roofers shows up. A simple gable roof is hard to get badly wrong. A Thornbury century home with three additions, two chimneys and a shed dormer is entirely possible to get badly wrong, and the failures will not appear for a few years. We spend more time on the details on these houses than on the field, because that is where the risk is.

Chimneys get new flashing, properly stepped and counter-flashed into a raked mortar joint. Reusing old chimney flashing on a new roof is the single most common corner cut we see on older homes in this area, and it undoes much of the value of the new roof.

Thornbury and Clarksburg have real architectural character and it is worth not flattening it. Modern architectural shingles come in profiles and colours that sit comfortably on a century home; some of the heavier, more dimensional products read as distinctly wrong on a nineteenth-century roofline. We will show you options that suit the house rather than whatever we have most of.

Standing-seam metal can look superb on the right older home, particularly on simpler farmhouse forms and on additions. On elaborate Victorian rooflines it can look busy and it is expensive to execute well over complicated geometry. Both of those are worth saying out loud before you commit.

If your property is designated or in a heritage area, material and profile changes may need approval. That is worth establishing before quoting rather than after, and we will raise it if we think it applies.