Roofing in Redwood City, CA

The city runs from the hills to the bay and carries the ZIP codes 94061 through 94065. Downtown and the neighborhoods around it are 94061, the inland streets toward the hills are 94062, the bayside and industrial blocks are 94063, and Redwood Shores across the Belmont Slough is 94065. Adeline comes out for every estimate, checks the roof, the attic where there is one, the flashings and the gutters, and writes a free estimate that shows repair and replacement side by side. Redwood City is the northwest corner of our service area, reached the same way as Mountain View and Sunnyvale, and the crew usually pairs Peninsula jobs on the same days.

Mount Carmel, southwest of downtown between El Camino Real and Alameda de las Pulgas, is the neighborhood people picture when they think of old Redwood City: one- and two-story homes from the early 1900s through mid-century, in Spanish Revival, Tudor and Craftsman styles, on streets that curve around the church that gives the area its name. Closer in, the downtown blocks around Courthouse Square hold the 1910 county courthouse that is now the San Mateo County History Museum, the Fox Theatre, and the Sequoia Station Caltrain stop, with older cottages on the streets that radiate from them.

These are steep, articulated roofs: clipped gables on the Tudors, low-pitch clay tile on the Spanish houses, wide-eaved gables with exposed rafters on the Craftsmans, and a brick chimney on most of them. On a Mount Carmel roof replacement the deck is the first question, because many of these houses still have skip sheathing under several roofs' worth of shingle, and the answer is usually a plywood overlay before the new roof goes on. We reflash every chimney with metal let into the mortar, line the valleys, and choose an architectural shingle that fits the house. On the tile roofs we lift, replace the underlayment and relay. Buyers in this part of Redwood City lean on our roof inspections service, because a pre-war roof is the biggest unknown in a Peninsula house purchase.

Woodside Plaza, on the west side off Woodside Road, was built in the late 1940s through the 1960s, mostly single-level ranch houses and a few Eichler-style homes on lots of 6,000 to 8,000 square feet. The roofs are simple hips and gables of moderate pitch, and almost all of them have been through the same sequence: original wood shake, a composition roof in the 1980s or 1990s, and now a second composition roof that is due. Some of the Eichler-style houses have flat or low-slope sections that need foam or a membrane rather than shingle.

Woodside Plaza is where our asphalt shingle roofing work in Redwood City concentrates, and where a tear-off shows the plywood that was added at the first re-roof, usually in good shape, with rot limited to the eaves. It is also where we do most of our Redwood City roof repair: valleys that were shingled closed and have worn through, vent boots cracked by the sun, and fascia that a leaking gutter has soaked for years. We hang new gutters and downspouts on these houses often, since the originals were sized for a smaller storm than the ones the last few winters have delivered.

Redwood Shores was built on land reclaimed from Leslie Salt's marshes and evaporation ponds, a project that began in the 1960s with about 1,400 acres set aside for development. The waterfront single-family houses date from the 1960s and 1970s, the townhomes and condominiums from the 1980s and 1990s, and the whole community is organized around its lagoons and overseen by the Redwood Shores Owners Association, an umbrella HOA active since 1981 that sits above roughly two dozen smaller associations. Oracle built its headquarters there, and the office towers along Marine Parkway are the skyline of that side of the city.

For a roofer, Redwood Shores means two things: an HOA with an architectural process, and salt air. Most of the roofs are concrete tile or composition on moderate pitches, and the townhome complexes usually re-roof as an association rather than house by house. We prepare the material and color submittals the association wants, and on individual lagoon-front homes we pay particular attention to the metal, because wind off the bay and the lagoons rusts a painted vent or a galvanized valley faster than anywhere else in Redwood City. Our roof leak repair calls from the Shores are often at the base of a corroded flashing rather than in the field of the roof.

That corrosion problem is exactly what stone-coated flashings were made for, and we finish every Redwood City roof with them. California Stone Coating, Inc., the Fremont manufacturer, coats the vents, roof jacks and flashings in granules that match the shingle or tile, with custom blends for the colors an HOA has approved. The finish resists rust and is designed not to chip, peel or fade, it needs no painting now or later, and it helps waterproof the base of the flashing, where a painted pipe most often fails. On a Mount Carmel Tudor the effect is that the pipes stop drawing the eye; on a Redwood Shores tile roof it is that the metal outlasts the salt. Where other roofers leave a row of painted pipes that begin to wear within the first year, this is the last detail on our roof and the one Adeline started the company to promote.

The city's motto came out of a 1925 slogan contest won by chamber of commerce president Wilbur Doxsee, who later admitted he had made the claim up, though it leans on a story that a German meteorological survey around 1912 rated the area one of the best climates in the world. Whatever the science, the weather is mild: the coastal hills block much of the ocean fog that soaks the coast side of the county, summers are warm rather than hot, and winter rain arrives between November and March. Even so, the marine layer reaches the bayside neighborhoods on summer mornings, the hillside streets in 94062 sit under redwoods and oaks that drop litter into every valley and gutter, and the atmospheric-river storms of recent winters have tested roofs that decades of gentle weather had let slide. We schedule roof maintenance in Redwood City for the fall, clearing moss, debris and gutters before the first storm.

Redwood City is in California Energy Code climate zone 3, and we confirm the current Title 24 requirement for each re-roof before ordering material. A re-roof requires a permit from the Building Division of the city's Community Development Department, which accepts applications online only through its eTRAKiT portal; we submit the application and meet the inspector. Business owners along Veterans Boulevard and in the Seaport area call us for commercial roofing on their low-slope buildings. Our office line, (510) 791-6457, is answered 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.