A roofing contractor for mill-era Cohoes

Cohoes was built as a mill city, and the housing that went up around the mills is still most of what stands today.

That means rowhouses, worker housing and multifamily buildings, packed tightly, sharing party walls, and topped with flat or low-slope roofs draining behind a parapet or to the rear. Up the hill there is more single-family housing, but the dense core is what defines roofing here.

Flat roofs on attached buildings bring their own set of problems, and almost all of them happen at the edges rather than in the field.

What we do most in Cohoes

• Flat and low-slope roof replacement with EPDM and membrane systems
• Parapet and party-wall flashing, the most common leak source on attached buildings
• Chimney flashing on older masonry
• Multifamily and rental property work for landlords and managers
• Repairs on single-family homes up the hill
• Drainage corrections where water is not reaching the outlet

Parapets and party walls

On an attached building, your roof meets your neighbour’s at a wall you may only half own.

Parapet walls are the recurring problem. The coping on top, the flashing where the membrane turns up the wall, and the masonry itself all have to work together, and any one of them failing lets water into the wall rather than through the roof. It shows up inside as a damp patch high on a wall, which is often mistaken for a roof leak in the middle of the roof.

Doing the wall detail properly is most of the work on a Cohoes flat roof, and it is where we spend the time.

Drainage on a low slope

A flat roof is not flat, or should not be. It is built with just enough fall to move water to an outlet.

When that fall is lost, through settlement, added insulation or a repair done unevenly, water sits. Ponding does not necessarily leak straight away, but it works on seams and it multiplies the load. Where we find it, we address the fall rather than just patching the seam that gave out.

See flat roofing, EPDM and TPO.

Working on an attached building

The practical constraint in Cohoes is that your roof has neighbours. Material and debris have to move through a narrow gap, staging has limited places to stand, and anything done at a party wall affects the building next door.

That is worth saying out loud at the quoting stage, because it changes scheduling more than it changes price. We plan access before we start, agree what happens at shared walls, and make sure the building is watertight at the end of each day rather than at the end of the job.

Across Cohoes

We cover downtown and Remsen Street, Harmony Hill, Van Schaick Island, Simmons Island and the Cohoes Falls area.

Neighborhoods we cover

• Downtown and Remsen Street
• Harmony Hill
• Van Schaick Island
• Simmons Island
• Cohoes Falls area