Blog

Replacing Original Cedar Shake on a Columbia Home A lot of Columbia’s earliest homes went up with cedar shake, and it suited the design language — natural material, weathering to grey, sitting quietly under the tree canopy. Those roofs are now decades old, and most are on their second or third covering. If your home […]

Low-Slope Roofs on Columbia Townhomes: Why They Leak and What Belongs There Columbia’s architecture leaned modern from the beginning. Long horizontal lines, shed roofs, deep overhangs, and roof planes that run much shallower than the steep gables you see in older Maryland neighborhoods. It still looks good fifty years on. It also creates a specific […]

Roof Replacement in Columbia, MD: Getting Village Approval Before You Start Columbia is not a conventional suburb. It was planned from the ground up, built out village by village, and the covenants that came with that plan are still in force. For most homeowners that means one extra step before a roof replacement: architectural approval. […]

Gutters and Drainage on Annapolis Homes: Sizing, Salt and Where the Water Goes Gutters get treated as an afterthought until they fail, and then they cause damage that costs many times what the gutters did. On Annapolis homes there are three distinct problems, and homeowners routinely fix the wrong one. Problem One: Capacity, Not Cleanliness […]

Replacing a Roof in the Annapolis Historic District: What to Plan For Downtown Annapolis has one of the best-preserved collections of early American architecture in the country, and the city protects it. If your home sits inside the historic district, a roof replacement is not simply a matter of picking shingles and booking a crew. […]

Nor’easters vs Summer Storms: How Coastal Wind Damages Annapolis Roofs Annapolis gets two very different kinds of damaging weather, and they break roofs in different ways. Understanding which one hit your house changes what you should be looking for afterwards. Why a Nor’easter Is Harder on a Roof A summer thunderstorm is violent and brief. […]