Downtown Luxury Slum

A quick review before I get into the meat of this post:

Our Downtown Luxury Slum is a contributing structure in the East Raleigh – South Park Historic District listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The listing reads: “5-bay hipped-roof duplex with hipped metal roof and
weatherboard siding ; original 4-over-4 doublehung-sash windows; attached porch with flat roof , twin wood-post supports, jigsaw-cut brackets, wood railing.”

Separate from that, we’re also part of the Prince Hall Historic District which is a Raleigh Historic Development Commission (RHDC) designation.

Because of this second designation, any changes we make to the exterior of our home require a Certificate of Appropriateness (COA, basically a permit from the RHDC). And the RHDC is generally going to be very picky about making changes that would contradict the listing information in the National Register of Historic Places, since those are our home’s contributing historic characteristics.

This is generally okay with us because the exterior look of the house is one of the major things that drew us to it. The other being the location.

We were able to get permission to convert the house from a duplex to a single family home because we were able to find some rudimentary evidence that it was originally built as a single family home, but otherwise we’re pretty happy with our contributing characteristics.

So when we finally gave in and decided that no matter how many roofing companies came out or how many times they came out, there was just no fixing this roof well enough to completely stop the leaking, we knew we were going to have to replace the old metal roof with a matching new metal roof. And luckily, normal repairs and maintenance don’t require a COA.

I mentioned we had a number of roofing companies come out and a number of frustrating experiences with one company just completely ghosting us before they ever completed any work (but they came over several times to assess the roof, provide an estimate, show us samples). Another company refused to even try to do any repairs on the roof and instead quoted us an exorbitant amount to replace the roof. Finally a friend referred us to Roofwerks and I just can’t say enough good things about them. The first time we called them, they came out to put in their best effort to dry-in the roof (basically apply a tarp and some sealant as a quick band-aid to prevent further leaking until they could do a more complete repair). They then put together a quote to do the repair, did the repair, and then came back several times when we discovered the repair wasn’t good enough. The not good enough was not entirely their fault. Our roof was really old and probably just not suited for repair, but also, as it turns out, we had two uncovered, unused pipes directly funneling rain from the sky into the attic.

Anyway, Roofwerks put together an extremely reasonable quote for roof replacement. The only complaint I can offer is that we had to be extremely persistent with them (getting the quote, getting the job scheduled) otherwise it seemed like they would just forget about us.

When they started removing the old roof, they quickly noticed that there was a layer of shingles under the the metal roof. The shingles were definitely old and worn and of a shape I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, but there’s no telling how old they were, or how long the metal roof has been in place, or what material the original historic roof was. All that to say, maybe we could have gotten away with really fancy shingle replacement, rather than metal. It’s my new mission in life to see if I can ever find some older pictures of this house.

But, like I said, we got a metal roof. I somehow thought they’d get the job done in a day, but I think it took them six full working days. They first had to remove the old metal and old shingles.

Then they replaced the old, hole-ridden, some rotten, some charred roof decking with plywood and added a synthetic underlayment.

And then finally they installed the Snap-Loc metal roof system along with custom ridge caps and hip caps and flashing and everything else needed to finish the job.

We couldn’t be happier with the outcome although I’ll have to wait do see if it leaks when we have a major storm.