Picking a roofing contractor in Colonie depends a good deal on which part of town you are in. The postwar Capes off Central Avenue and the larger houses in Loudonville are different buildings with different failure points, and a quote that treats them the same is not really a quote. We work across both, along with the commercial corridors that run through the middle of the town.

Two kinds of Colonie roof

The Town of Colonie covers a lot of ground and a lot of building eras, and the roofs fall into two broad groups.

North and west of the city line there are postwar Capes and ranches by the thousand, built quickly in the 1950s and 60s. They have simple rooflines, shallow attics and, very often, ventilation that was never adequate for the insulation someone later added.

Then there is Loudonville and the older pockets around it, where the houses are larger, the pitches are steeper and the rooflines are considerably more complicated.

What we do most in Colonie

• Replacements on postwar Capes and ranches, usually with ventilation corrections
• Ice dam damage repairs at eaves and in valleys
• Steeper, more complex replacements on larger Loudonville homes
• Flat and low-slope commercial roofs along Central Avenue, Wolf Road and the Fuller Road area

The Cape Cod ice dam problem

If you own a Cape in Colonie and you get ice at the gutter every winter, the roof is rarely the culprit.

A Cape has knee walls and a finished or semi-finished second floor, which leaves very little space at the eaves for both insulation and an air path. Warm air reaches the underside of the deck, melts the snow above it, and the meltwater refreezes where the roof overhangs the cold exterior wall. The ice ridge builds and pushes water back up under the shingles.

Replacing the roof without addressing that gives you a new roof with the same problem. When we re-roof a Cape we look at the intake at the soffit, the path to the ridge and the insulation at the knee walls, and we put ice and water shield well up from the eave as a second line of defence.

Commercial work along the corridors

Colonie has a lot of low-slope commercial roofing on Central Avenue, Wolf Road and around Fuller Road. That is membrane work rather than shingles, and the failures are different, generally ponding, seam separation and blocked drains rather than blown-off coverings. See commercial roofing.

Across the town

We work throughout Colonie including Loudonville, Newtonville, the Village of Colonie, Maplewood, Boght Corners, Stanford Heights and the Fuller Road area. Latham has its own page, since we are there often enough to warrant it.

Wolf Road, Central Avenue and the older pockets

One thing worth saying about Colonie is that the town is not uniform, and neither is its weather exposure. Properties on open ground near the commercial corridors take more wind than the sheltered streets in Loudonville, and the roofs show it. After a serious wind event it is worth a look even where nothing obvious has come off, because a broken seal strip is invisible from the ground and only announces itself in the next storm.

Neighborhoods we cover

• Loudonville
• Newtonville
• Village of Colonie
• Maplewood
• Boght Corners
• Stanford Heights
• Fuller Road area