Roofing in Bryan

Bryan and College Station sit on top of one another and share a climate exactly. They do not share a housing stock, and above the ceiling that is the only thing that matters.

Bryan is the older city. Large parts of it were built long before the subdivisions south of it, which means brick, real chimneys, complicated roof geometry, and streets with a canopy of mature trees over them.

The canopy problem

Shade is worth a great deal in a Texas summer and it costs something on the roof.

It keeps slopes damp. A north facing slope under oaks may not properly dry for days, which is exactly the condition the algae thrives in. Bryan’s older streets have the heaviest staining in the valley and it is not a coincidence.

It drops things. Leaf litter fills valleys and gutters, and a dammed valley pushes water sideways under the shingle courses instead of down. Gutters that back up send water under the bottom course at the eave. Both present exactly like roof failures.

It abrades. A limb that touches the roof in a wind, and here it is nearly always windy at some point in the day, wears a track through the granules over a few seasons.

None of this is an argument for removing the trees. It is an argument for gutters being cleared, valleys being kept clean, and limbs being kept off the roof rather than merely off the walls.

Masonry

A real brick chimney is a roofing detail, not a decoration. Where a roof plane meets it there should be step flashing woven up under the shingle courses and counter flashing let into the mortar joints so water cannot track behind.

On a house that has been reroofed two or three times since the 1970s, there is a fair chance that somewhere in that history somebody solved a chimney leak with a thick bead of roofing cement. It works for a couple of years and then cracks, and the next person repeats it. By the third generation there is a mound of tar and no flashing underneath.

Doing it properly is slow, skilled and one of the biggest single differences between a careful bid and a cheap one on an older Bryan house.

Complicated roofs

Older houses here have more planes, more junctions, more dormers and more places where the roof meets something. Every junction is a detail and every detail is a potential leak. It also means the price per square is legitimately higher than for a plain rectangle south of town, because far more of the labour goes into the parts that are not field.

When you compare bids on an older Bryan house, compare what they say about the junctions. The shingle is the easy part.