Roofing in Mountain View, CA

Mountain View has three ZIP codes, and they map neatly onto three kinds of roof. 94040 is the residential south and center, single-family streets toward Los Altos. 94041 is the compact downtown around Castro Street and the Caltrain station. 94043 is the north, with Monta Loma, Rex Manor, the Googleplex and Shoreline. Adeline handles the estimate herself on every one of them, on the roof and in the attic, and the free written estimate separates repair from replacement so you can weigh the two. Mountain View is the southern anchor of the service area we work from Fremont, with Sunnyvale next door and Santa Clara beyond it.

Monta Loma, in the northwest corner of the city, was built in the 1950s and contains three tracts: the Eichler homes originally sold as Fairview, the houses by John Calder Mackay, and Mardell Manor. The Eichlers are post-and-beam with glass walls, open plans, radiant floor slabs, and flat or barely sloped roofs with no attic under them. The roof deck is the ceiling. That construction is the whole reason Eichler owners think about roofs more than most people: there is nowhere for a leak to hide, ponding on a flat roof finds every seam, and the original tar-and-gravel is long gone from nearly all of them.

The two systems we install on a Mountain View Eichler are spray polyurethane foam and single-ply membrane. Foam goes on as a continuous layer with no seams, adds insulation to a house that has none in the roof, and gets a protective elastomeric coating that needs to be renewed on a schedule. A single-ply membrane, heat welded at the laps and terminated with metal at the edge, is the other route, and it suits an owner who wants a roof that can be walked and inspected simply. Either way the details decide the outcome: tapered insulation to kill the ponding spots, properly flashed skylights and atrium edges, and scuppers and drains that actually clear the roof. Our roof replacement page covers both, and our roof maintenance visits handle the annual winterizing that a flat Mountain View roof needs before the rain, clearing debris, sealing splits and recoating where the surface has worn.

Old Mountain View is the grid of streets on either side of Castro Street, the downtown that grew from a stagecoach stop into a farm town. Victorian houses and early 1900s farmhouses and cottages stand next to newer townhomes and apartments, and the older ones have the roofs you would expect: steep gables, small dormers, a brick chimney, and decking that has carried several generations of roofing. A cottage a few blocks from the Castro Street restaurants and the Caltrain station is often on its first roof since the wood shingles came off, and that composition roof is now tired.

For these houses we do a full tear-off, overlay the old skip sheathing with plywood, replace rotted eave boards, reflash the chimney with metal cut into the mortar, and install an architectural shingle in a color that suits a Victorian, usually a charcoal, slate or weathered wood. Our asphalt shingle roofing service is the right fit here, and roof inspections are common in Old Mountain View because the houses turn over and buyers want to know what the roof will cost them before they write an offer.

Cuesta Park, the neighborhood south of El Camino Real around the park of the same name, was built in the 1950s and has a consistent look: single-story ranch houses of 1,500 to 2,200 square feet on lots of 5,000 to 6,000 square feet, on tree-lined streets. The roofs are moderate-pitch hips and gables, sometimes with a low-slope section over a later addition, and most of them have had one or two composition roofs since the original shake. This is where we do the steady work of a South Bay roofer: roof repair on a leaking vent boot or a rusted valley, replacement when the shingles have gone brittle, and ventilation and insulation upgrades in attics that were insulated once, decades ago, and never touched since.

Cuesta Park roofs also collect the debris from the neighborhood's mature trees, which means moss on north slopes and clogged gutters every fall. We size and hang gutters and downspouts that can carry a real storm and add guards where the trees make cleaning a twice-a-year chore.

On a Mountain View roof, the pipes matter more than usual. An Eichler roof is low and visible from the atrium, the yard and the street, and a row of painted vents against a foam or membrane surface looks unfinished; on a Cuesta Park ranch the vents sit on a front-facing hip where everyone sees them. We finish both with stone-coated flashings from California Stone Coating, Inc., the Fremont manufacturer. The flashings are coated in granules matched to the roof color, with custom blending available for the greys and tans common on Eichler membranes. The coating resists rust, is designed not to chip, peel or fade, needs no painting, and protects the base of the flashing, where a leak on a flat roof is most likely to begin. Painted pipes can start to wear within the first year; these do not need to be repainted at all.

Mountain View's weather is gentle by most standards, with summer highs in the high 70s and low 80s under a bay breeze, morning fog through spring and summer, and about 15 inches of rain between November and March. The mildness is a trap for roofs. Fog keeps a shaded slope damp for hours after sunrise, algae and moss take hold, and a flat roof that never fully dries ages faster than one that bakes. The city's north edge is Shoreline at Mountain View, 750 acres of park, lake and wetland dedicated in 1983 on top of a closed landfill, with the Googleplex and the rest of North Bayshore beside it, and the houses nearest that shoreline get the most fog, the most wind and the earliest moss of anywhere in the city. Our roof leak repair calls in Mountain View cluster in the first real storm of the season, when a roof that seemed fine in October gives up.

Mountain View sits in California Energy Code climate zone 4, and we verify the current Title 24 requirement for each re-roof before choosing a product, particularly on low-slope roofs where the cool-roof rules differ from steep-slope. A re-roof here needs a permit from the Building Division of Mountain View's Community Development Department, which takes reroofing applications through its ePermits portal and schedules inspections online; we apply and meet the inspector. Our line, (510) 791-6457, is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.