Commercial Roofing for Small-Town Storefronts and Farm Buildings
Kanawha doesn't have any high-rise office buildings. It is an agricultural community, and so are the buildings that need to be re-roofed here. Main Street flat roofed storefronts are located just a few steps from pole barns and grain bins and machine sheds. We have repaired and replaced commercial roofs on both types of structures, but we do not approach them in the same manner that a large urban commercial roofing company would.
Many of the commercial buildings surrounding Kanawha along Highway 65 were constructed many years ago using tar and gravel or built-up roofing. Over time, such roofs begin to fail. They do not go bad overnight, but it feels as though they go bad all at once when they finally begin to leak. It goes from a soft spot right by the drain to a roof leak in the storage room that puts a bucket under the drips onto the shelves.
As a Mason City roofing company, we’ve repaired many of these types of commercial buildings, and we know the signs. Storefronts on Main Street are most likely going to fail first along their parapet walls. Farm buildings, such as sheds and outbuildings, are more apt to fail along the panel seams. The bottom line is that a minor roof repair on a commercial building can become a major expense if it is not properly taken care of.
For property owners and businesses in Kanawha and the Mason City area, David's offers a variety of commercial roofing services including the following:
- Flat roof repair and flat roof replacement of storefronts and small commercial buildings located along Main Street.
- Metal roofing installation, standing seam metal roofing, for machine sheds and outbuildings.
- Roof leak detection services in buildings where the source of the leak is different from the point where water enters the building.
- Roof coating and roof waterproofing on older flat roofs to give them more time until replacement is needed.
- Storm damage commercial roof repair after the hail storms that are common to the area.
With 25 years of commercial roofing experience, one thing I have noticed is that farmers generally do not call us to replace or repair their commercial roofs until after the building is already leaking into equipment inside. They are busy working the ground, not looking at their roofs. Roof seams that are leaking on a grain bin with rust forming around them are not something you can ignore. A flat roof that has standing water after the rains do not do themselves.
In many instances, flat roof problems at these older Main Street storefronts do not really originate on the roof. The problem may be the building's drainage. If the flat roof has a few places where the membrane has begun to fail, but the water just cannot get off the roof, the flat roof will need more than a roof coating. We've fixed roofs that other crews replaced twice because nobody bothered to check the slope.
When it comes to farm buildings, we only install what we know works best. In this part of the world, it is metal roofing. If you need a new roof on an implement shed or a shop building, it is going to last longer than shingle roofing and it is going to fare better in the wind. That said, we do not provide shingle roofs for residential properties.
But if you've got a storefront on Main or a bin site off the highway, we've probably already been out that way this month.
Getting to A1 Roofing Services from Kanawha
We're based out of 608 12th St NE in Mason City, and the drive down to Kanawha isn't one we dread. It's one we know cold. David's made that run more times than he can count, past the grain elevators, past the turnoff for Highway 65, right into the heart of your neighborhood.
Here's the route our crew usually takes:
- Head south out of Mason City on Highway 65.
- Follow it down through the open country toward Hancock County.
- Cut over toward Kanawha on the county road once you hit the junction.
- Roll into town and we're right there among the same streets and same rooflines we've worked on before.
It's a drive that takes some time, but that's fine. We'd rather spend the extra minutes on the road than cut corners once we're up on your roof. And, the trip gives David time to think through what he's expecting to find before he even gets the ladder out.
Distance changes how a crew treats a job, whether folks want to admit it or not. Guys who don't want to make the drive start rushing. They cut the inspection short, they skip the extra look at the flashing, they just want to get back to their side of town. We don't operate that way. If you're calling us out to Kanawha, we've already blocked the time for the drive and the job. No rushing, no shortcuts.
We keep the truck stocked before we ever leave Mason City. Flat roof materials, metal panel stock, the waterproofing membrane rolls we use most often, all of it rides with us. So if David gets up on your roof and finds a bigger issue than expected, he's not driving back to grab supplies and leaving you with a tarped-over hole for another day.
Scheduling works the same whether you're a block off Main Street in Kanawha or out on the edge of town near the grain bins. We ask the same questions, we show up with the same gear, we walk the roof the same way. The only difference is the drive time, and that's on us to manage, not you.
Give us a call and we'll get a time locked in. David or one of the crew will make the drive down, walk the roof with you, and give you the straight read on what's going on up there. No sales pitch.
Just the truth about your roof. From the guy who’s gonna be fixing it.
Why Kanawha’s Old Buildings Need Different Care
Drive down the main street in Kanawha. You’ll see it immediately. Those brick storefronts. The flat roofs from way back before people ever thought about TPO and PVC membranes.
Those buildings have history. They’re charming in a lot of ways. But the fact that your roof was installed years before some of these folks even learned to walk won’t stop a leak.
An older flat roof on a commercial building is not just “an older flat roof.” It’s a different roof entirely. What’s under that roof might not even be the same stuff we’re used to working with. We could be talking about a wood plank deck, not steel decking or concrete. What insulation you got? It could be stuff that’s been there since the 1940s, which is pretty much the same as not having any insulation at all.
And your drainage? A lot of older flat roofs have drain placement that just wasn’t planned out right. Or the downspouts are too small. It’s like the building got designed a long time ago and nobody updated that part to handle how much rain we get.
We’ve worked on enough of these old commercial buildings throughout Kanawha to know how they usually go. You know exactly how the problem ends up. You have that same spot where water sits all the time. No matter how many times you fix the leak, it just keeps coming back in the same spot. And you probably don’t even know it’s happening until one day you notice a wet spot on that drop ceiling in the office. By that time water’s been getting into the building for a while.
I’m guessing David has encountered something similar on more than a few occasions. The building owner says they have “a little leak in that back corner.” But once we get the roof apart, you find that the deck’s soft in a six-foot radius. That’s not a little leak. That’s water that’s had a lot of time to get in, quietly destroying your building from the inside out.
The same thing goes for metal roofs. You got a metal roof on an older commercial building in Kanawha. It was put on twenty years ago. Maybe twenty-five. That roof’s going to have a few issues. The fasteners started working themselves loose years back. The seams started to separate. We’ve seen what happens when building owners just don’t bother fixing them. A metal roof starts leaking in the spring time and by the time the fall weather storms show up, you’ve got full-on major water problems.
There are older commercial buildings all over Kanawha. Most of them were built to last, in some cases they’ve got good solid construction underneath. But a lot of these older commercial roofs haven’t been built to last that long, and they’re getting old. A building put up sixty or seventy years ago might have a roof that's been patched five or six times since, each patch a different material, none of them talking to each other the right way.
This is where a commercial roof inspection matters. We’re not talking about a quick once-over while standing on the ground. I want to look underneath the roof, the deck, the drainage, the vents. The old commercial building is very good at hiding its flaws. It might look fine from the ground and still be rotting out underneath.
That’s why we do free roof inspections specifically for building owners in Kanawha. You can’t fix what you can’t see. A lot of the time you can’t see what’s going on, especially with older commercial roofs, so that’s what you need to do.
If you’ve had a building in Kanawha longer than you’ve been alive, treat it like it deserves more attention, not less.