Roofing Contractor in Somers Point, NJ

Older roofs, older decking

Century-old houses often have plank sheathing rather than plywood or OSB, with gaps between the boards. Plank decking holds fasteners differently, can cup and separate with age, and does not always provide continuous support for modern shingle products. It is entirely workable — it just needs to be identified before the job is scoped rather than discovered on the second morning.

• Plank decking with gaps, cupping or split boards
• Rot at eaves and around long-standing leak paths
• Framing that has moved over a century, producing uneven planes
• Multiple previous coverings and repairs layered up

Complex rooflines on historic housing

Bungalow, craftsman and stick-style houses carry features that simply do not appear on post-war stock: deep overhangs, exposed rafter tails, multiple dormers, porch roofs tying into main slopes, and steep pitches meeting at awkward valleys. Every one of those is a detail to be flashed properly, and collectively they are the reason an older house takes longer to roof than a newer one of the same footprint.

Porches, which are roofs

The deep porches characteristic of this housing stock have their own low-slope or shallow-pitched roofs tying into the main structure. That tie-in is a roof-to-wall junction, and it is one of the most common leak points on a house of this type — particularly where the porch roof has been re-covered at some point without the wall junction being reworked.

Bayfront wind and the older stock

At sixteen feet on a bayfront, Somers Point gets meaningful open-water wind fetch across Great Egg Harbor Bay. Older houses with deep overhangs catch that wind under the eave, and a century-old roof with weathered fastening is less able to resist it than a recently installed one.