Serving Carrollton - Dallas County
Commercial Roofing in Carrollton, TX
The industrial parks around Trinity Mills and out along the Frankford corridor went up in waves. Whole streets of mid-size tilt-wall buildings were built within a few years of each other, roofed with the same assembly by the same crews, and they are aging on one shared clock.
On a tilt-wall building the leak is often not the roof
Concrete panel construction puts a vertical joint every few feet, and those joints continue above the roof line as well as below it. The sealant in them has a service life of its own, normally much shorter than the membrane, and once a joint above the roof opens, water enters the wall, runs down behind the base flashing, and appears inside as what everybody calls a roof leak.
The same holds for the reglet where counterflashing was cut into the panel. A reglet full of dried sealant, or a surface-mounted counterflashing whose fasteners have loosened, admits water behind a base flashing that is doing its job perfectly well. Replacing membrane at that location spends money on the wrong side of the problem.
So the order on these buildings is to eliminate the wall before touching the field. Water tested at the joint, at the reglet, at the panel above the flashing line, and only after that at the roof itself. Joint restoration is not roofing work, but it belongs in the roof budget, because it is the thing standing between your roof and the results it was built to deliver.
When a whole park comes due in the same stretch of years
An owner holding four or five buildings in one of these parks is holding four or five roofs of matching age and matching construction. They will not fail on the same Tuesday, but they will reach the end of their range within a few seasons of one another, and an owner who has not planned for it receives the entire bill at once.
The way out is to treat it as a program. Survey every building in a single pass, plug each one, and rank them by measured condition rather than by which one called first. Some will need work this year, some will hold under maintenance for two or three more, and the sequence gets decided deliberately. Buying the work as a planned series also lets material, staging and crew time be arranged once instead of five separate times.
Uniform construction carries one clear advantage worth using. When five roofs share an assembly and a build year, what the plugs show on the first three is a reliable indication of what the remainder are doing, and the survey converges fast.
Building stock
Details that repeat across this stock
Panel joints above the roof
Sealant with a shorter life than the membrane, failing in a place that reads as a roof leak from inside the building.
Reglet counterflashing
Cut into the panel at construction and never touched since. Dried sealant here defeats a base flashing in perfect condition.
Interior roof drains
One or two per bay in buildings like these, so a single blocked line puts a large area under standing water.
Dock canopies and aprons
Low-slope areas tied into the main field, where the transition is usually the oldest detail on the whole building.
Carrollton roofs, common questions
Water is coming in at the wall. Is that a roof problem?
Frequently it is not, and on tilt-wall construction it is among the first things to rule out. Water entering an open panel joint or a dried reglet above the roof line runs down inside the wall and exits at the ceiling, which looks identical to a membrane failure from below. Water testing the wall costs an hour and saves you from buying membrane work that could never have solved it.
We own several buildings in one park. Do they all need roofs at once?
Almost never, even where they were built together. Exposure differs building to building: how much equipment sits on each roof, which ones drain properly, which have had leaks attended to and which have not. A survey across all of them produces a ranking, and the ranking is what lets the spending get spread over several budget years instead of absorbed in one.
The building is 1980s tilt-wall with a gravel roof. Recover or remove?
The plugs decide it. A recover needs a single existing covering, dry board beneath it, and a surface even enough to build on. Gravel-surfaced asphalt roofs of that age often fail the second test, and once the aggregate has to come off and the board is holding water in places, the labor advantage of a recover evaporates. We would rather show you the samples than argue about it.
What comes out of a multi-building survey?
A file per building with the assembly identified, plug results, a marked plan, photographs of every deficiency and a condition grade. Then one ranked schedule across the portfolio saying which roof gets replaced, which gets repaired, which goes on maintenance, and roughly when each happens. It is meant to be usable as a budget document rather than a stack of separate reports.