Kittatinny Roofing

Roofing contractors in Allentown, Pennsylvania

Allentown is a city of row homes and twins, which means most roofs here do not stop at the property line. What happens at the wall between two houses decides more than what covers them.

What Allentown roofs are dealing with

Center City and the South Side are dense with attached brick housing from the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. On a row, the roof is a continuous plane crossing several owners, and the party wall that separates them rises through it. That junction is where water gets in, and it belongs to two households at once.

The West End and the outer wards are later and detached, with steeper gables and the slate that local quarries made ordinary here. Those roofs are a century old and reaching a decision point together, which is a scheduling problem as much as a technical one.

Center City and the South Side are rows and twins of brick from the turn of the last century, where the roof is a continuous plane crossing several owners and the party wall rises through it. The West End and the outer wards are detached, steeper, and heavily slated by local quarries.

Slate does not age the way asphalt does. The roof age check puts each part of the envelope on its own clock.

Covering South Side, West End, Center City, East Side, Midway Manor and the rest of Allentown.

Slate does not fail the way shingle fails. On old housing it gives out where two centuries meet. Which is why the useful question is not what the covering looks like, but what it runs into.
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.

When the work happens in Allentown

Work runs from spring into late autumn, and on attached housing the schedule has an extra constraint: the street. Container placement and protection for the neighbors on both sides have to be arranged, and in the denser wards that can mean a permit and a date rather than simply a van arriving.

What moves the price in Allentown

On a row, the party wall flashing decides it: rebuilt metal outlives the covering, sealant does not, and the two prices are far apart. On the detached side the question is the slate itself (repair, replace in kind, or change material), and those three answers differ by an order of magnitude.

Three questions decide the price here more than any product choice does. The comparison checklist will tell you which estimate has looked properly:

  • If it is slate, is it being repaired, replaced in kind, or changed for something else, and does the framing carry the difference?
  • What does the decking work out to per sheet, and on what assumption?
  • Is the flashing new?

The work

Before you call anyone in Allentown

Between the ridge and the river the same three questions keep arriving. Rather than answer them town by town, the guides take them properly:

Why roofs fail here

Six ways a roof gives out around here, one page each, and the slate ones behave nothing like the rest.

Nearby

All areas covered