Kittatinny Roofing

Roofing across the Lehigh Valley

A free connecting service linking homeowners with local roofing providers across the Lehigh Valley and Berks County. What follows is what a century of local slate and a valley full of row homes ask of a roof.

Slate does not fail the way shingle fails. On old housing it gives out where two centuries meet. Six places a roof gives way. The one everyone checks is No. 2, the shingle field. The other five do most of the failing.
Garage Point 1: the ridge 1 Point 2: the field of the covering 2 Point 3: the valleys 3 Point 4: flashing at a shared wall 4 Point 5: a penetration 5 Point 6: the overhang 6
  1. 1 The ridge. The highest course, and on slate the one most often reset by hand.
  2. 2 The field. Quarry slate on the old houses, asphalt on everything since. Two very different clocks.
  3. 3 Valleys. Where leaf litter settles, and where a slate roof usually ends its life.
  4. 4 Wall flashing. The party wall of a row or twin, rising through a roof two houses share.
  5. 5 Penetrations. Holes cut on purpose. When access is awkward they get sealed instead of rebuilt.
  6. 6 The overhang. Where meltwater from a warm attic reaches cold framing and stops.

What to save, and what to let go

Quarry slate, cement shingle, copper flashing worth more than the labor to strip it. Half the decisions on a roof around here are about what stays, and an estimate that does not address that has not really looked.

The work

Seven markets, three counties

Seven markets from the cement mills into Berks County: the brick rows of Allentown and Reading, the mill housing along the Lehigh, the planned streets of Wyomissing, and the subdivisions that filled Lower Macungie in a single decade. Different centuries, and roofs that fail in different places because of it.