Historic Home Roofing in Franklin Park, PA —
Work That Respects the House

A house built in 1895 was framed, decked and roofed with materials and methods that a modern crew doesn't necessarily default to. Rafters may be undersized by today's span tables but have carried the load for a century because the original roofing was light and the ventilation was passive. Plank decking with gaps between boards behaves differently under synthetic underlayment than the solid OSB decks crews are used to. None of that is a problem until someone treats the house like a 2005 build and gets surprised on the deck.

Detail work matters more too. Historic Franklin Park homes tend to have more roof intersections per square foot than newer construction — turrets, dormers, cross-gables, bay windows with their own small hip roofs, porches tucked under the main roofline. Every one of those intersections is a flashing decision, and on these houses the flashing was very often built in copper because that's what the trades used before modern sealants existed. Replacing it with anything less is a downgrade the house will eventually show you.

Curb appeal is not a soft consideration on these properties either. Buyers, neighbors and, on reviewed properties, the borough itself notice shingle color, profile and how a valley or ridge reads from the street. We plan for that from the first estimate, not as an afterthought once the material is already on the truck.

Fox Chapel side / Franklin Park Hills border's grand older homes along Beaver Road and the estate properties in Blackburn Heights present a different problem: scale. Multiple wings, long copper valleys, standing seam porch roofs tied into a slate or shingle field, and enough roof plane that a small detailing mistake shows up as a much bigger leak than it would on a village cottage.

Blackburn Heights also carries real wind exposure on its ridge that the sheltered borough never sees. On historic homes up there we upgrade ridge and hip fastening, use engineered snow guard placement rather than a decorative scattering, and plan staging around long private drives and mature landscaping — protecting the grounds is part of the job, not an afterthought.

These properties are also where the cost of getting flashing wrong compounds fastest, because the copper and slate that built them were expensive materials chosen to last a century. Replacing that work with anything less than in-kind materials on a visible slope is a decision worth discussing before it's made for you by a lower bid.

Natural slate and standing seam copper remain the gold standard for visible historic roofs, and where either survives in repairable condition, we push hard to keep it — the cost math and the value math both favor restoration over replacement in most cases. Where slate must be replaced on a non-reviewed slope or budget rules out the natural material, synthetic slate gives a reasonable profile at roughly half the weight and a fraction of the cost.

For homes already converted to asphalt, architectural shingles in a color and shadow line that reads appropriately from the street are the honest, affordable option, and we'll say so plainly rather than pushing a more expensive system a given house doesn't need. What we won't do is quote a full slate or copper replacement on a house where a well-detailed asphalt roof already serves the owner and the street just fine.