Serving Richardson - Dallas and Collin Counties
Commercial Roofing in Richardson, TX
The office inventory along the Telecom Corridor was built for tenants who mostly are not there anymore. Buildings from the early and middle 1980s have been re-leased, subdivided and re-leased again, and every one of those turns left something new fastened to the roof.
Second-generation roofs with the first one still underneath
A plug taken on a Richardson office building of that era frequently comes out as a stack of two: an original gravel-surfaced asphalt roof from construction, and a replacement laid over it somewhere in the following two decades. Both are still sitting on the deck. That one finding narrows the next move to full removal, because a third covering is not permitted.
It says something useful about insulation as well. The original board sits at the bottom of that stack, it is thinner than anything current code would accept, and if either covering has leaked across the years, moisture is down there where nothing has ever dried it. Plugs pulled at the leak and stepped outward from it show how far that has travelled.
What almost never turns up is paperwork. The replacement was installed by a contractor nobody at the current management company has heard of, and no drawing survived the last sale of the building. So the first survey spends its time producing the record that ought to exist already: assembly identified, plan drawn, equipment located, condition photographed and dated.
Every re-tenanting leaves something behind
Subdividing a floor plate creates zones, and zones create equipment. Supplemental units on sleepers, split-system line sets crossing the field, exhaust for a lab bench or a break room, a condenser stand where a suite needed cooling the base building could not supply. Each is a penetration, and each was cut by whoever wanted that suite conditioned by Friday.
Some of that work is perfectly good. Some of it is a hole with sealant around it and an assurance. What we look for is a curb or a pipe boot whose workmanship does not match the field around it, because a mismatch is usually the signature of a detail made by somebody whose trade was not roofing.
Then there is the equipment nobody bothered to remove. Dead curbs from units that came off years ago, capped with plywood and mastic. Dish and antenna mounts from a tenant long gone. Abandoned conduit sitting on blocks. Every one is a maintained penetration in a roof it no longer serves, and the right answer is removal with a proper deck patch rather than one more year of sealant.
Older retail along the Central corridor
Single-story multi-tenant retail brings a different problem. One roof, several leases, and a failure that arrives as three phone calls from three tenants describing three unrelated ceilings. Sorting that out begins by tying each interior location to a point on a roof plan, because the entry is commonly above none of them.
On these centers the demising wall transitions, the interior drains sitting between two suites, and the scuppers through the rear parapet account for most of the damage. Condensers added tenant by tenant over twenty years account for the rest.
Set the rules before the next tenant improvement
The cheapest roof protection available on a building like this is a written rule. Any vendor placing a fastener, a cut or a load on the roof reports it, and any penetration gets flashed by a roofing contractor rather than by the trade that made it. Put that language in the tenant improvement documents and in the vendor access procedure.
A logged access list handles the rest. When water shows up four months after a suite build-out, a sign-in sheet answers in one minute what a leak investigation would otherwise spend most of a day working out.
Richardson roofs, common questions
Previous tenants left dishes and conduit up there. Does it matter?
It does. Every abandoned mount is still a penetration, still somewhere water can get in, and still an object a maintenance technician will step around rather than over. Removal, a deck patch and a properly flashed closure is a modest scope that permanently deletes a category of leak. It also cleans up the roof plan, which shortens every inspection that follows.
We have no drawings for the building. Where does that leave us?
It is the normal starting point on this stock rather than a problem. The first visit builds the record: plugs to identify the assembly and check the board, a plan drawn with drains, curbs, penetrations and hatches located on it, and photographs tied to those locations. Every inspection after that compares against the baseline instead of starting from nothing.
A tenant wants a rooftop unit installed. What should we require?
That the curb and the flashing are executed by a roofing contractor rather than by the mechanical installer, and that you receive photographs of the finished detail before the tenant improvement is signed off. Also that the unit sits on a curb instead of blocks resting on membrane, and that condensate is piped to a drain rather than discharged onto the sheet.