SPF Testimonial: Church Restored With Sloping Roof
 

What do you do when you arrive on a jobsite and find that the metal roof deck is deteriorating under your feet? It may not be an uncommon problem in the roofing business, but it certainly can be a dangerous one.

For the Drizone Inc. crew of Beltsville, Maryland, this was their reality. The owner of the building knew the roof wasn’t going to last much longer, but what he didn’t know was how few days it had left. To start the church roof rehab job, the Drizone crew headed to Hyattsville, 15 minutes south of headquarters. What they found was unacceptable.

“When we proceeded to tear the roof off, we discovered the rotted metal deck,” said Drizone owner, Ralph Chiodo. It needed to be replaced. So, Chiodo headed back to the rep to handle necessary changes to the contract and to plan accordingly. When the building landlord, Young Won Trading, agreed to the changes, it was decided that the SPF crew would replace the old, rusted metal, apply spray polyurethane foam (SPF) to create a slope, and then finish the roof with an acrylic coating.
 
To start, the 10-man crew set about uncovering the deteriorating deck. During the first four days of a two-week-long project, the team worked their way across the rooftop. They removed the old metal with Sawzalls and Spud bars and then disposed of it in a Dumpster on the street before moving on to the next step. Then, they replaced these open sections with new, highly fluted metal on top of the roof’s bare cross sections. Each sheet of metal was 25 feet wide by three feet long. The high fluting gave the roof extra stability, while the next layer, the Oriented Strand Board (OSB), gave the fluting full coverage.

“We put the OSB down so we didn’t have to fill the flutes,” said Chiodo. They used screws to attach the metal fluting as well as the OSB. Each sheet was eight feet by four feet for a total of 32 square feet. The crew needed a little less than 160 boards to cover the 5,000 total square feet of surface being replaced on the church’s roof. To avoid leaving any open areas exposed overnight, they worked in 30-feet-by-30-feet sections along the rooftop each day. They worked a little bit at a time until they had a completely finished roof.

When the crew hit about the halfway mark, a rain storm caused delays.

“When it rains, you can’t work,” Chiodo said. Three days of rain caused the team to take a break. Because they didn’t leave any exposed areas overnight, there was no worry that the roof would get rain damage.

When the rain stopped and they were able to return to the Hyattsville site, they started installing the SPF insulation. Aside from the success of the jobs previously done by Chiodo’s crew for the building’s owner, one of the main reasons that he chose SPF for this building was its ability to create a sloped roof.

“When we arrived, there was standing water on the front side of the roof,” Chiodo explained. What they needed to do to counteract this ponding was taper the roof toward the scuppers. That way, any rainwater would slide directly into the drains. To do this, the roof needed the help of SPF.

The Drizone crew used crickets, or foam pieces, around the four scuppers to give a substrate for the SPF to build upon for the slope. Once all of the crickets were placed, the crew used Chemical Design’s 2.7-3.0-pound roofing foam to lead the rain to these drains. They applied the SPF — two inches for high spots and one inch for low spots — with a Gusmer H20/35 proportioner and Gusmer GX7 gun. To reach the top of the two-story building, they needed approximately 150 feet of hose. The sprayer — the leader of the job (a protocol used on most Drizone sites) — achieved the full thickness in one pass. To achieve a safe job site, in addition to a parapet wall already installed around the roof’s perimeter, the crew wore Tyvek suits, gloves, and a respirator.

“When you spray foam, you have to cover it up at the end of the day,” said Chiodo. That meant that before the team went home for the night, they had to cover any exposed foam. They used Chemical Design’s light gray acrylic coating for this flash coating as well as for the final full pass applied once all the foam was on the roof. The Drizone crew used a Graco airless sprayer and gold gun to apply the coating at three gallons per square (100 square feet per square).

Although this Drizone job was a fairly straight-forward one, it still goes to show that maintaining an open line of communication with the owner (or general contractor) can pay in the end. Without the ability for Chiodo to rework the bid and reschedule the job, this successful church roof may have ended differently.
   


 

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