Roofers in Santa Monica

Santa Monica filled in between the 1920s and the 1950s and never got bulldozed the way other parts of the basin did. Spanish Colonial Revival and California bungalow from the twenties and thirties, wartime and postwar stucco boxes, then the 1950s and 1960s apartment stock: courtyard buildings, dingbats over tuck-under parking, and a great many two-to-four unit buildings owned by individuals. Roof shapes here are simple and often flat. The Spanish revival houses carry low-pitched tile, sometimes with a flat section hidden behind a parapet. The apartment buildings are almost all low-slope: cap sheet, modified bitumen, or TPO on the newer re-roofs. Those roofs fail at seams, at parapet flashings, at drains and scuppers, and wherever water sits after the rain instead of leaving.

The other half of the story is salt fog. The marine layer comes in most nights for much of the year, roofs stay wet into the late morning, and salt air sits on every piece of metal on the building. Fasteners corrode. Drip edge, valley metal, pipe flashing and vent collars rust from the underside where nobody can see them. Galvanized gutters and downspouts go early. Plenty of Santa Monica roofs get replaced because the metal failed, not because the tile or the membrane did. That is why stainless or hot-dipped fasteners and coastal-grade flashing are worth the line on a quote.

Age is doing its own work on top of that. Most of this stock has been re-roofed once, a lot of it in the 1990s, so a thirty-year shingle laid in 1994 is finished. There is more on both kinds of job on the roof repair and roof replacement pages.