Slate roofing

Repair first, on a roof that is worth repairing

Slate fails in individual pieces, not all at once. A roof with a handful of slipped or cracked slates and sound flashing is a repair, and treating it as a replacement throws away a material that had decades left in it.

The parts of a slate roof that genuinely wear out are usually the metal: valleys, step flashing, and the copper around chimneys. Replacing those while keeping the slate is the work that keeps these roofs alive.

Matching what is already there

Slate varies by quarry, and the color and texture of a hundred-year-old roof cannot be matched out of a catalog. We work with salvaged stock where matching matters, and we will tell you before we start how close the match is going to be on a visible slope.

Working on slate without breaking it

Slate is walked on differently from asphalt, hung differently, and cut differently. The most common damage we see on slate roofs was done by the last person who worked on them — a satellite installer, a chimney sweep, or a roofer who treated it like shingle.

Staging, ladder hooks and slate hooks are not optional on this work. They are the difference between a repair and a bigger repair.