Roofing for NoDa's Mill Cottages and Mixed-Use Buildings

The typical NoDa mill house has a compact roof, often a simple side gable or pyramidal hip, with a lower-pitched porch roof attached to the front. Rafters are full-dimension lumber spaced wider than a modern builder would use, and the decking is usually boards rather than plywood. When we tear off a mill cottage roof, we commonly find several layers of old roofing, soft boards at the eaves, and no underlayment at all.

A proper replacement adds solid decking where it is needed, synthetic underlayment, drip edge, and a shingle or standing seam metal roof installed with attention to the porch junction, which is where most mill-house leaks begin. Metal is a natural fit on these homes. It suits their simple forms, sheds the debris from the neighborhood's street trees, and handles the low porch pitches better than shingles can. On lots this narrow, we also plan the tear-off to keep debris and ladders off the neighbor's property.

NoDa's commercial roofs range from century-old brick mill buildings with heavy timber framing to wood-frame apartment buildings finished in the last ten years. The converted mills typically carry modified bitumen or single-ply membranes installed during renovation, with old skylight openings, parapets never designed for modern coping, and masonry walls that need through-wall flashing to keep water from entering behind the membrane. Breweries and restaurants in older one-story buildings along North Davidson add rooftop exhaust, cooling equipment, and grease vents that attack a membrane if they are not detailed correctly.

The newer apartment and mixed-use buildings generally have TPO roofs over tapered insulation, with amenity decks, elevator overruns, and dozens of plumbing and HVAC penetrations. For all of these owners we provide inspections, repair programs, and replacement proposals that document the roof's condition in photos and lay out the phasing so tenants and taprooms keep operating. Permits, where the work calls for them, are part of our scope.

NoDa's blocks are more tightly built than the leafy neighborhoods south of Uptown, so wind exposure on the small houses is moderate and the main threats are hail, driving rain from summer thunderstorms, and the remnants of tropical systems that stall over the Piedmont. Street trees along North Davidson and the residential side streets drop leaves and seed pods into the shallow gutters on mill cottages, and the overflow is a common cause of rotted fascia and eave boards.

On the commercial side, hail that would barely mark a shingle roof can puncture an aging single-ply membrane or bruise a modified bitumen cap sheet, and wind can lift an unsecured corner of membrane into a tear. After a storm we inspect both kinds of roofs, document what we find, and provide emergency tarping or temporary membrane patches where a leak cannot wait for a permanent repair.

Almost every mill cottage in NoDa has been renovated, and many have doubled in size with rear additions, dormers, or full second stories. Those projects created new valleys, new wall-to-roof intersections, and low-slope sections that meet steep ones, and they were not always built by people who understood flashing. The roof leaks we trace in the neighborhood most often start at those intersections rather than in the field of the roof.

We diagnose with water testing when the source is not obvious, open and rebuild the flashing at the failing intersection, and replace low-slope addition roofs with a membrane tied correctly beneath the shingles or metal above it. For homeowners planning an addition, we are glad to review the roof design before framing begins so the new roof drains away from the old one instead of into it.