Marshall TX Roof Pros: Roof Replacement, Leak Repair and Flashing Into Brick
Roofing for houses and commercial buildings in Marshall, with the masonry joint priced in writing.
- ✓The masonry line is written into the estimate before you sign anything
- ✓Pointing mortar named by its ASTM C270 type on the warranty letter
- ✓Joints cut by hand, because a grinder breaks the edges off old brick
- ✓A return visit booked for the first hard December rain after closeout
Why Marshall Chooses Marshall TX Roof Pros
- ✓We survey every roof-to-brick termination with a probe before quoting, and you get those photographs whether or not the job is ours, because the joint depth is the number that decides the scope.
- ✓Pointing mortar is specified by ASTM C270 type and chosen to be weaker than the brick around it, so the joint stays the part that wears rather than the face of the wall.
- ✓Joint preparation is done with hand chisels wherever the joints are thin. A cut-off wheel is faster and it breaks brick edges and overcuts the vertical joints, which you then live with forever.
- ✓We turn down elastomeric coating work on masonry, every time it is asked for, and explain what trapping moisture behind a brick face actually does to the wall over a wet winter.
- ✓Crickets are framed behind any chimney wide enough to dam water, sized to shed clear of the flue, rather than being replaced with a bead of sealant and a hope for a dry season.
- ✓Estimates carry two separate numbers, roofing and masonry, so you can see exactly what a cheaper bid has quietly removed from the scope.
How It Works
We probe the joints, not just the shingles
Before any number goes on paper we walk the roof with a probe and a flashlight and check every masonry termination. How far the mortar has receded behind the face, whether the counterflashing is let into a joint or glued to the brick, whether there is a cricket behind the chimney or a shelf of packed pine needles. That survey decides the scope, and the photographs are yours at the end of the visit, hire us or not.
Two numbers, kept separate
You get a roofing price and a masonry price, itemized, with the ASTM C270 mortar type named and the linear footage of joint counted. Decking and fascia are priced per sheet and per board so a bad deck cannot become a surprise on day two. Nothing is bundled into a single round figure, because a single round figure is how the mortar work quietly disappears from a job.
Masonry first, roof second
Where a chimney or parapet needs repointing we do that work while the deck is open and the staging is up, since that is the only week in twenty years it will be cheap. Joints are cut by hand to avoid breaking the brick edges, pointed in a mortar softer than the brick around it, and kept damp while they cure. Then, and only then, the metal goes back in.
A closeout you can check yourself
At the end you get the warranty letter with the mortar type and metal gauge written into it, the manufacturer's registration confirmation, lien releases from the supply house, and a magnet run over the yard while you watch. We book a return visit for the first hard rain of the following December, which around here is not a difficult appointment to justify.
Our Roofing Services in Marshall, TX
Roof Replacement
A full replacement here is two trades sharing one schedule. Tear-off is the only week in twenty years when the chimney base, the sidewall step flashing and the parapet coping are open, reachable and cheap to fix.
Roof Leak Repair
Ceiling stains lie about location. Water lands on a joist, runs the length of it and drops through drywall ten feet from where it entered.
Storm Damage Restoration
A squall line comes through Harrison County and the phone rings about shingles. The shingles are usually the least of it.
Hail Damage Roofing
East Texas is not the caprock. Storms that drop stones big enough to total a roof reach Harrison County far less often than the yard signs would suggest, and many of the hail calls we take here turn out to be blistering, mechanical scuffing or a manufacturing defect instead.
Wind Damage Roofing
Wind never starts in the field. It finds an edge, gets underneath and works from there, which is why the first shingles to go are almost always along a rake or an eave where a starter course was skipped or a drip edge was fastened long and loose.
Roof Inspections
A great deal of what passes for an inspection around here is a sales visit with a ladder attached. Somebody photographs three lifted shingles, hands you a number and leaves.
Asphalt Shingle Roofs
Nearly every house in Marshall wears asphalt, and the decision people agonize over, color, is the one that matters least. The two that matter are whether the granule is algae-resistant and whether the sealant strip will actually bond in the week your roof goes on.
Metal Roofing
Metal moves. A long panel is a measurably different length on a January morning than on a July afternoon, and every detail on the roof either allows for that or slowly tears itself apart.
Tile Roofing
We should say this before you read any further. Tile is rare in Marshall.
Flat and Low-Slope Roofing
The low-slope roofs in Marshall fall into two groups that have almost nothing in common. Downtown there are brick blocks with parapets on all sides and no through-wall flashing anywhere in them.
Roof Coatings and Sealing
This is the page where we lose work on purpose. We coat metal roofs and we coat sound low-slope membranes.
Roof Ventilation
Attic ventilation gets sold in this state as a summer heat product. In Harrison County the trouble is more often winter moisture, and the two problems want different answers.
Skylights
Half the skylight calls we take in Marshall are not leaks. They are condensation, and the difference is easy to establish.
Gutters and Downspouts
Think of a gutter on a Marshall house as a masonry protection device that happens to be attached to the roof. That is not a stretch.
Fascia and Soffit
Marshall has a lot of eaves that are not soffits at all. On the Victorian and early commercial stock the eave is a built-out boxed cornice, a piece of carpentry with brackets, a bed mold and a frieze, and it is doing architectural work rather than ventilation work.
Chimney Flashing
The rest of this site keeps circling back to this one page. More of our leak work in Marshall starts at a chimney than anywhere else on the roof, and the reason is not the metal.
Emergency Tarping
A tarp is a decision made badly under pressure, so it is worth knowing our rules before you need them. The main one is that nothing we fasten in an emergency goes into a masonry wall, no matter how convenient that wall is.
Commercial Roofing
Commercial work in Marshall is two different jobs wearing the same name. There is the historic brick downtown, where buildings share party walls and parapets and nothing drains privately.
Insurance Claim Help
Start with the part most contractors skip. On a Marshall house with a masonry chimney or a brick parapet, the roof and the brickwork are usually handled as separate scope, and a policy that pays for your roof may pay nothing at all toward repointing the wall behind it.
What Marshall Customers Say
Two other companies quoted a re-roof and neither mentioned the chimney. These folks probed the joints, showed me photographs of how far the mortar had gone back, and priced the brickwork on its own line. The leak has not come back.
Our house is older than most of the county and I have watched people wreck brick like it with a grinder. They cut the joints by hand and told me what mix they were using and why. That conversation alone was worth the call.
I called about getting the whole back wall sealed and they talked me out of it, then explained what sealing it would have done. Ended up repointing and fixing the downspout instead for less money. Not many people argue themselves down.
Storefront with a shared parapet and a leak nobody could find. They surveyed both roofs, talked to the owner next door before touching anything, and put the drainage plan in writing. Handled it like adults, which was a relief.
Marshall TX Roof Pros is a roofing company in Marshall, Texas, taking on roof replacement, leak repair, storm restoration and chimney flashing for houses and commercial buildings throughout Harrison County. We install architectural laminate shingle, standing seam and exposed-fastener steel, modified bitumen and single-ply membrane, and we detail every roof-to-masonry joint ourselves instead of handing it to a subcontractor who will be gone by Friday.
Almost every roof we touch here dies into brick somewhere. A chimney through the field, a garage wall a lower slope runs into, a parapet on a storefront downtown. That joint is where our leak calls come from, and it is the part a hurried crew buries under a tube of sealant and a coat of gray paint. We quote the mortar work as its own line, before anyone climbs a ladder.
We are a small outfit and we book like one. If your roof can be repaired for a fraction of what a replacement costs, we will quote the repair and tell you how long it should buy you. If the brick behind your flashing needs a mason first, we will say that as well, and we will wait for him, even on the jobs where waiting costs us the work.
About Marshall TX Roof Pros in Marshall, TX
We are roofers who learned masonry because Marshall made us. Working on a housing stock that runs from antebellum brick through T and P railroad cottages to nineteen-seventies brick-veneer ranches, you find out quickly that the roof and the wall are one system, and that a crew which only knows shingles will hand the same chimney back to you every three years.
So the work is organized around the joint. Hand-cut joint preparation, pointing mortar specified by ASTM C270 type and batched to be softer than the brick it sits in, hemmed metal let into a bed joint, crickets framed behind anything wide enough to dam water. It is slower than a sealant gun and it is the reason our repair callbacks are boring.
Three reasons to call somebody else. The mortar line on our estimate is real money, so a competitor who simply leaves it off will beat our number and you are entitled to let them. If your roof is a plain gable with no brick on it anywhere, our whole method is beside the point and price should decide it.
And if what you have already settled on is a wall sprayed with a sealer, we are the wrong company, which is something we say during the first call rather than after taking a deposit.
Recent Projects Across Harrison County and the Big Cypress basin
Service Areas
Marshall TX Roof Pros serves Marshall, TX and surrounding communities including:
Commercial roofing on Marshall's brick blocks and metal buildings
Commercial work in Harrison County splits into two worlds. Downtown and along the old rail frontage there are nineteenth and early twentieth century brick blocks with parapets, party walls and no through-wall flashing, where the membrane detail at the wall base decides whether the building leaks.
Out on the highway there are pre-engineered metal buildings, warehouses and church annexes where the fasteners and the panel laps decide it. We work on both, and we scope them as different problems rather than pricing them off the same square-foot number.
- ✓Parapet base flashing detailed without face-fixing a termination bar into soft brick
- ✓Single-ply membrane in TPO or PVC, adhered where the deck allows, over tapered polyiso
- ✓Modified bitumen and torch work where a membrane cannot be used near an occupied space
- ✓Party-wall coordination so a new drainage layout does not push water onto the neighbor
- ✓Scupper and overflow sizing checked against the wettest month rather than the annual average
- ✓Raised curbs for rooftop units instead of wall-hung condensers on nineteenth-century brick
- ✓Metal building retrofits with new closures, foam blocks and oversize fastener replacement
- ✓Night and weekend phasing for storefronts, restaurants and churches that cannot close
- ✓Roof plans and joint photographs handed over as a maintenance file, not a sales folder
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does a roofing company keep talking about mortar?
Because in Marshall the water usually gets in at a brick joint rather than through the field of the roof. The older housing stock and the whole downtown core were built with a lime-rich mortar that is deliberately softer than the brick it holds, so it wears back over time and has to be renewed.
When a roofer fastens flashing to brick whose joints have receded half an inch, the metal has nothing to hold and the leak comes back the following winter.
Can you not just seal the chimney and be done with it?
We will not, and we turn that job down several times a year. A brick wall has to be able to dry outward. Coat it with an elastomeric or a waterproofer and the moisture that gets in behind, and some always does, cannot leave. Salts then crystallize under the face and push the outer skin of the brick off in sheets. You spend money to make the wall fail faster. Repointing and a proper cricket cost more and actually work.
What does Marshall's rainfall actually mean for my roof?
The NOAA 1991 to 2020 normals for the Marshall co-op station put us at 50.18 inches a year, and December is one of our wettest months at just over five inches. That combination matters. It means walls and chimneys spend the cold half of the year wet rather than dry, and it means a shingle laid in a cold December week may not bond until the following spring unless the perimeter is hand-sealed.
Do you work on the old brick buildings downtown?
Yes, and we treat them differently. Portland cement was not manufactured in the United States until 1872, so anything in Marshall's nineteenth-century core went up in a lime mortar and cannot be repointed with a modern high-strength mix without damage. On those buildings we work to the National Park Service repointing guidance and specify a low-strength pointing mortar. We also coordinate with the owner next door, because party walls are shared and drainage decisions are not private.
How far out from Marshall do you go?
Harrison County is home ground, and we run west to Longview and Lakeport, north through Jefferson and the Cass County towns, and south into Panola County as far as Carthage and Gary City. Anything past about an hour we will usually decline rather than take a job we cannot get back to quickly when a repair needs a second look.
Is a repair ever the right answer instead of a new roof?
Often. If the shingles still hold their granules and lie flat and the trouble is one flashing, one valley or one boot, a repair is the honest call and we will quote it that way with an estimate of how many seasons it should carry you. We would rather sell you a four hundred dollar repair now and the roof in six years than sell you the roof today on a story you cannot verify.