Same-day emergency response across Harrisburg· Licensed & insured · Free written estimates
1000 N Cameron St, Harrisburg, PA 17103
Specialty & Property Types
Period-correct materials, copper detailing and documentation formatted for historic review.
Serving Harrisburg & Dauphin County · 1000 N Cameron St, Harrisburg, PA 17103
24/7 emergency response
A person answers, day or night.
Based on N Cameron St
Local crews, not storm chasers.
Licensed & insured
Liability and workers' comp on every job.
Free written estimates
Itemized line by line, photos included.
Harrisburg's historic housing stock is unusually intact for a city of its size. Olde Uptown is a designated historic district. Bellevue Park was laid out in 1907 as a planned garden suburb and still reads that way. Shipoke holds some of the oldest riverfront houses in the city. Camp Curtin, Midtown and Riverside are full of late-1800s and early-1900s work that has never been meaningfully altered.
Roofs are where that stock is most at risk, because the cheapest answer is always to strip the original and staple down architectural shingles. It works, it is watertight, and it permanently removes something that cannot be put back.
Restoration is the other option, and on a sound structure it is usually the better financial decision as well as the better preservation one. A slate roof that is only nail-sick has decades left in it.
Old roofs fail in specific ways, and almost none of them require a tear-off.
The slates are fine; the iron nails holding them have rusted through. Slates slide off in ones and twos after windstorms. This is repairable and does not mean the roof is finished.
Many Harrisburg Victorians have gutters built into the cornice. When the lining fails, water goes directly into the wall and the cornice framing. This is urgent work and it needs a metalworker, not a gutter installer.
Century-old flashing eventually gives at the seams and at the mortar joint. Replacing it in copper preserves both the detail and another fifty years of service.
Roofing cement, face nails, asphalt patches over slate, aluminum flashing on a copper roof. Undoing bad repairs is a large share of restoration work in this city.
The roof edge on a Victorian is joinery, not just roofing. Rotted brackets and cornice returns come with the job and have to be replicated.
Additions made in the 1920s through 1950s often intersect the original roof badly. Those tie-ins are frequently the actual leak.
The governing principle in preservation work is to repair rather than replace, and to replace in kind when repair is not possible. Applied to a roof, that means a specific sequence.
We survey the whole roof and sound every accessible slate or tile, mapping what is sound, what is failing and what has already been badly repaired. We retain everything that has service life left. Where slates must be replaced on a visible elevation, we harvest matching material from a hidden rear slope and install new material where it will not be seen from the street. Flashing is replaced in copper rather than aluminum, because that is both correct and durable.
Everything is photographed before, during and after, and the record is formatted so it can be submitted to a review board or attached to a resale disclosure.
If your property sits in a designated district, exterior work that is visible from the public right of way may require review before it starts. In practice, a like-for-like slate repair is straightforward; changing material, color or profile is where projects run into difficulty.
The reliable path is to document what is there now, propose a repair that matches it, and submit clearly. Applications get refused for lack of information far more often than for the substance of the work.
We prepare our scopes and photos with that in mind. Our plain-English overview is in roofing in Harrisburg's historic districts: rules for Olde Uptown and Bellevue Park.
Our process
No surprises, no change orders you did not agree to, and photographs of anything we find before it gets covered.
Every elevation examined and mapped. You get a written report describing what is original, what is sound, what failed, and what previous repairs did.
Repair-first scope with clear options where a decision is genuinely yours to make, priced separately so you can choose.
Photos and specifications packaged for historic review where the property requires it.
Material harvested for reuse, staged and protected. Nothing original is discarded without being offered back to you.
Slates hung with copper hooks, flashing formed and soldered on site, box gutters relined, cornice carpentry replicated to the original profile.
Full photo record plus a written maintenance schedule, because historic roofs last when they are inspected rather than ignored.
Why us for this job
Roofing is a trade with a reputation problem and a good share of it is earned. Here is what is different about how this job runs with us.
Ask any contractor for these before you sign
The governing principle in preservation work. We survey and sound the whole roof, retain everything with service life left, and replace only what cannot be saved — matched for size, thickness and colour.
Where slates must be replaced on a street-facing slope, we take matching material from a hidden rear slope and install new stock where nobody sees it. Standard preservation practice, and it keeps the front of the house original.
Valleys, step and counterflashing, box gutter linings, dormer cheeks and finials formed and soldered on site. Aluminium on a historic roof is cheaper and it looks it from the sidewalk.
Before-photographs, a written description of existing and proposed material, and samples where colour matters — assembled so it can be submitted to a review board or attached to a resale disclosure without rework.
Honest pricing
Restoration is priced by skilled hours and material scarcity. It costs more per square than an asphalt re-roof and it lasts several times as long, which changes the comparison considerably over the life of the building.
Compare a restoration quote against the true cost of an asphalt replacement across the same fifty years — that is two or three asphalt roofs, plus the permanent loss of the original. On a historic Harrisburg house the math frequently favors restoration.
A roof that is 90% sound is a repair project. A roof that has been badly patched for forty years is closer to a rebuild.
Copper is expensive and soldering is skilled work. Box gutter linings in particular are labor-intensive and very much worth doing properly.
Steep Victorian roofs, third-story turrets and tight rowhome lots all require staging that a suburban ranch does not.
Cornice, bracket and dormer repair is joinery. Replication of a missing profile takes shop time.
Documentation and submission time is real, and we build it into the scope rather than surprising you with it.
Where we do this work
Historic work concentrates where the housing survived. Olde Uptown is a designated district and the most exacting of them; Bellevue Park, Midtown, Shipoke, Riverside and Camp Curtin all carry substantial original slate, copper and cornice work. Outside the city we restore the Federal and Victorian cores of Middletown, Hummelstown and Mechanicsburg, and travel for slate specifically as far as Carlisle, Elizabethtown and Mount Joy.
FAQs
The questions Harrisburg homeowners actually ask us on this job.
Olde Uptown is a designated district, and several other areas including Bellevue Park and parts of Shipoke and Midtown carry historic character or overlays. Check with the city before starting exterior work — we can help you find out.
Physically yes, and outside a regulated district it is your decision. Understand what you give up: resale appeal in a preservation-minded neighborhood, the original fabric of the building, and a roof that would have lasted generations more.
Cornice returns, brackets, dormer cheeks and finials, yes. We profile what remains and replicate it. Where nothing remains we work from historic photographs or from a matching house on the block.
Pennsylvania slate itself commonly serves a century or more. Restored with copper flashing and stainless or copper fasteners, a sound slate roof is realistically a multi-generational roof. See our slate roof repair service for individual repairs.
Often, but it depends on your policy wording rather than on the roof. A standard replacement-cost policy pays to restore to pre-loss condition, which for a slate roof means slate — but some carriers will argue for a functionally equivalent material at a lower cost. What decides it is documentation: proof of what was there, a scope written in like-for-like terms, and where relevant, evidence that the property sits in a district where substitution is restricted. Check whether your policy carries an ordinance-and-law provision too; on an older building that is frequently what covers bringing the work up to current code.
Keep reading
Repair and restoration for the Pennsylvania slate roofs on Harrisburg's Victorian and early-1900s homes.
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