Kittatinny Roofing

Roofing across the Lehigh Valley

A free connecting service linking homeowners with local roofing providers across the Lehigh Valley and Berks County. What follows is what a century of local slate and a valley full of row homes ask of a roof.

A roof here rarely gives out in the field. On old housing it gives out where two centuries meet. Six places a roof gives way. The one everyone checks is No. 2, the shingle field. The other five do most of the failing.
Garage Point 1: the ridge 1 Point 2: the field of the covering 2 Point 3: the valleys 3 Point 4: flashing at a shared wall 4 Point 5: a penetration 5 Point 6: the overhang 6
  1. 1 The ridge. The highest course, and on slate the one most often reset by hand.
  2. 2 The field. Slate on the older stock, shingle on the rest. Two very different clocks.
  3. 3 Valleys. Where leaf litter settles, and where a slate roof usually ends its life.
  4. 4 Wall flashing. The party wall of a row or twin, rising through a roof two houses share.
  5. 5 Penetrations. Holes cut on purpose. When access is awkward they get sealed instead of rebuilt.
  6. 6 The overhang. Where meltwater from a warm attic reaches cold framing and stops.

A roof almost never fails in the middle

It fails where it meets something else. The wall a split-level roof stops against, a dormer cheek, a skylight head, the open edge at the eave. And in this valley it fails on a calendar: meltwater from a warm attic reaching cold framing a season works on every seam it can find. The first useful question about a leak here is not what the shingles look like, but what they are running into.

The work

Seven markets, three counties

Seven markets from the cement mills to the Berks County line: the brick rows of Allentown and Reading, the mill housing along the Lehigh, the planned streets of Wyomissing, and the subdivisions that filled Lower Macungie in a single decade. Different centuries, and roofs that fail in different places because of it.