Roof Repair and Roofers in Pasadena

Pasadena built out early, and most of what went up between 1900 and 1940 still stands under a roof nowhere near original. The wood shake is long gone. Most of these houses were re-roofed once, much of it in the 1990s, so a thirty-year shingle laid in 1994 is finished. Age-out is the most common reason people here call a roofer.

The Craftsman bungalows in Bungalow Heaven and Garfield Heights, built from the 1900s through the 1920s, have deep overhangs, shallow pitches, and dormers and porch roofs tying into the main slope. Every junction is a place water can find, so these roofs go wrong at the valleys and flashings, not out in the open field of shingle. The deodar cedars, oaks and sycamores over those streets keep valleys and gutters loaded with debris, which holds water against the flashing until it gets in.

The Spanish Colonial Revival stock of the 1920s and 1930s through Madison Heights and the Oak Knoll corridor fails somewhere else. Clay barrel and concrete tile give out at the underlayment, not at the tile. An eighty-year-old tile can be sound while the felt beneath it has turned to dust, which is how a tile roof leaks badly and looks perfect from the street. Lifting a few tiles is the only way to know.

The postwar ranch tracts in Hastings Ranch and east Pasadena are the straightforward composition shingle work. On the mid-century houses on the San Rafael and Linda Vista hillsides the trouble is low slope: ponding water and failed seams on TPO, modified bitumen or cap sheet.