Replacing a commercial roof is as much a scheduling problem as a roofing one — tear-off or recover, sequenced so the building keeps running.
The membrane is the easy part. These are the choices that decide whether a new flat roof reaches its full service life or quits early — and on Grand Valley buildings, our sun and our hail shorten the margin for getting them wrong.
Sometimes a new TPO membrane can go over the old one and save you an entire demolition. Sometimes the weight, the code, or wet insulation underneath says absolutely not. It's the first question worth answering, and we'll tell you which one you've got.
Insulation, cover board, deck. Wet insulation stays wet, and a brand-new roof laid over it is a brand-new roof with a problem already sealed underneath. What we find down there shapes the whole scope.
Section by section, dried in before we leave each day, so Monday looks like Monday downstairs. The roof changes over a matter of days; the business underneath keeps doing what it does.
If the old roof ponded, laying a new membrane in exactly the same shape just gives you a newer puddle. A replacement is the one moment when where the water goes can actually be changed — worth talking through before anything is ordered.
Parapets, edge metal, and curbs reflashed rather than reused. These are unglamorous and they're exactly what decides whether the roof makes it to the end of its expected life or starts leaking early.
Monsoon bursts and cold-weather TPO welding both have opinions about roofing. We don't open more roof in a day than we can close before we leave it — that's a scheduling rule, not a slogan.
Nobody replaces a commercial roof on a whim. The order of operations matters more than the speed, and knowing the plan up front is most of what makes it manageable.
If the roof turns out to have real life left, we'll say so — a repair is often the right answer. Start with the commercial roofing overview if you're still weighing it.
Three signs usually decide it: leaks appearing in new places rather than the same one, insulation that has taken on water across a meaningful area, and a membrane that's brittle or chalked out to the point where a patch won't hold. One of those may not settle it. All three do.
Or start with a repairSometimes. A recover is a legitimate approach when conditions allow, and the deciding factor is usually what's trapped in the existing insulation — which isn't visible from the surface. Too many existing layers or a deck that needs attention will also rule it out. We look before we answer, because a recover over a wet roof is a mistake you don't discover for years.
Longer than a house and far less than most people fear — it depends on the square footage, how much tear-off is involved, and how much rooftop equipment has to be worked around. We'll give you a realistic window before you commit, and we schedule so the roof is dried in each day rather than left open.
Generally no. The disruption people actually notice usually isn't the roofing — it's the dumpster, the loading zone, and the noise directly beneath the crew. Tell us where your customers park, which doors have to stay clear, and when your quiet hours are, and the staging plan gets built around that instead of around our convenience.
Worth raising early, before anything is specified. Ponding is sometimes just a drain sitting slightly high, and sometimes it's the deck itself having settled — and those two lead to very different scopes. What we won't do is lay a new membrane over it and let you rediscover the same puddle next spring.
There are typically two, and they're different things: the manufacturer's coverage on the membrane itself, and the roofer's coverage on the workmanship. The terms depend on the system installed and the details of the job, so we'll put the specifics in writing with your estimate rather than quote you a number here.
Before anyone talks scope or schedule, we'll get on the roof and tell you what you're actually dealing with. We replace commercial roofs across Grand Junction and the Western Slope.
