Portland ME Roof Pros: Roof Replacement, Repair & Cornice Work
Expert residential and commercial roofing services. Free inspections across Portland, South Portland, Westbrook and Scarborough, Maine.
- EPA Lead-Safe Certified firm, with a certified renovator on site whenever painted surfaces are disturbed
- Written contract to Maine's Home Construction Contracts Act, deposit capped at one third
- Free inspection, with your assessor build year printed on the front of the report
- Covering and painted roof edge quoted as two separate lines you can accept independently
Our Roofing Services in Portland, ME
Roof Replacement
A replacement here is two jobs printed on one estimate. There is the field, meaning tear-off, deck work, underlayment and covering, and there is the roof edge, where the drip edge lands on painted rake, fascia and soffit boards.
Roof Leak Repair
Most leaks we get called to in Portland announce themselves outside before they ever reach a ceiling. Paint blisters and peels on the underside of a soffit, or a rake board darkens and holds a fingernail.
Storm Damage Restoration
Storms that damage roofs in this city arrive as nor'easters: a long fetch of wind and rain over many hours rather than a violent twenty minutes. The damage pattern follows.
Hail Damage Roofing
This page mostly exists to talk you out of a claim. Maine sits near the bottom of the national tables for damaging hail, and on the roofs we look at in this county the honest answer to "is this hail?" is almost always no.
Wind Damage Roofing
Wind takes the edge of a roof first, and on a house built before the war the edge is the weakest thing on the building. Rake trim, drip edge and the starter course fail together, and once the first tab lifts the wind has something to hold.
Roof Inspections
An inspection here answers three questions, and the third one is the reason people call us rather than a general home inspector. How much life is left, what will it cost when it goes, and does the work you are contemplating cross into the painted trim.
Asphalt Shingle Roofs
Asphalt covers most roofs in Portland and it should. It is the cheapest square foot on the market, it handles this climate, and on a house whose real problem is the trim at the edge, spending the covering budget on something exotic is money in the wrong place.
Standing Seam Metal Roofing
Metal has real traction in Maine, for defensible reasons. A concealed-clip standing seam panel in Kynar will outlast three asphalt roofs, it sheds rather than absorbs, and it has no exposed fastener to back out over thirty winters.
Tile Roofing
We will service tile in Portland and we will almost never recommend installing it. That is not a taste judgment.
Flat & Low-Slope Roofing
The thing that sets the price of a low-slope roof in Portland is not its area. It is the length of wall it dies into.
Roof Coatings & Sealing
We sell fewer coatings than any roofer we know, and the reason is that most of what is sold as coating in Maine goes onto the wrong building. It belongs on sound commercial single-ply and on weathered metal.
Roof Ventilation
Every fleet of roofers in the country gives the same ventilation advice: add ridge vent, cut the soffits open for intake, done. On a Portland house built before the war, half that advice is wrong and the other half is often physically impossible.
Skylights
A skylight is a roofing job on the outside and a very different job on the inside, and in Portland's older houses it is the inside that decides whether we recommend one at all. The interior threshold in the federal renovation rule is six square feet per room, not twenty.
Gutters & Downspouts
Portland has two kinds of gutter and they are not the same product. There is the hung aluminum trough that most houses have now, and there is the original built-in trough formed into the cornice itself, which a surprising number of older buildings here still have under the paint.
Fascia, Soffit & Cornice
The other pages here lean on this one. On a Portland house the covering is a commodity and the trim at its edge is not.
Chimney Flashing
Chimney flashing is the single most common source of a leak we are called to in this city, and it is almost always because somebody solved it once with a tube of sealant. Sealant against masonry lasts about two winters and gets sold as forever.
Emergency Tarping
Tarping is a holding action and it should be sold as one. The job is to stop water entering tonight, protect what is inside, and leave the permanent repair to be scoped in daylight when the whole roof is visible and nobody is making decisions in the wind.
Commercial Roofing
Commercial work in Portland runs from Old Port mixed-use blocks and converted mill space to Riverside industrial buildings, medical offices and the apartment portfolios that make up much of this city's housing. Two legal lines cut through that list and both surprise owners.
Insurance Claim Help
We are roofers, not public adjusters, and Maine licenses those separately. What we do is give your carrier a scope so specific and so well documented that there is very little left to argue about, and tell you honestly when you do not have a claim worth filing.
Portland ME Roof Pros is a roofing contractor in Portland, Maine, working on roof replacement, leak repair, architectural asphalt shingles, standing seam metal, self-adhered low-slope membrane, ventilation, gutters, and the painted fascia, soffit and cornice at the roof edge. We take single-family houses, two- and three-unit wood-frame buildings and commercial decks, and we quote the covering and the edge as two separate numbers.
That split is not a sales device. The American Community Survey puts about 47 percent of Portland's housing units at 1939 or earlier and roughly 72 percent at 1979 or earlier, which means the trim around most roofs in this city carries pre-1978 paint. Federal renovation rules treat disturbing more than twenty square feet of it as a different job with different labor, containment and cleanup.
So the useful question on a Portland roof is rarely which shingle. It is where your scope stops. Strip the field and nothing painted moves. Replace one rotted rake board and the job changes shape. We measure that line before pricing anything, put both numbers in writing, and tell you when the right answer is to leave sound paint exactly where it is.
What Portland Customers Say
Three roofers quoted our 1908 two-family and all three gave one lump number. These folks gave two, showed us the feet of rake board they wanted to take off and what that changed, and then told us the front cornice was fine and to leave it. We spent less than we had budgeted.
Called about a leak I was sure was the field. They found it at the chimney counterflashing, which somebody had solved with a caulk gun years ago. Cut it into the mortar joint properly, repointed, done in a day. They also told me the roof itself had six or seven years left and did not try to sell me one.
Standing seam over a complicated roof with a lot of trim. What sold me was that they were straight about the metal not getting us out of the fascia work, when the other bid implied it would. Snow retention over both doors was in the base price rather than added later.
We wanted skylights in a 1920s house. They walked the attic, said the ceiling work would be the expensive half, and put in two tubular units through the unfinished space instead for a third of the money. Same light. I appreciated being talked out of the bigger job.
Why Portland Chooses Portland ME Roof Pros
- ✓Every estimate carries two numbers, the covering and the painted roof edge, because in this city they are governed by different rules and only one of them behaves predictably
- ✓The report opens with your build year pulled from the City of Portland assessor's record, not guessed from the sidewalk by somebody looking at your clapboards
- ✓We are not lead inspectors and never pose as them; Maine law reserves identifying a hazard to a licensed inspector or risk assessor, and our reports say so in those words
- ✓Sound paint over sound wood gets left alone, and we will hand you a written estimate stating that the correct spend on your cornice this year is nothing
- ✓Intake ventilation goes in at the eave beneath the starter course, so nobody cuts sixty feet of slot into your painted soffit to satisfy a net-free-area calculation
- ✓We never ask for more than a third of the price up front, because that is the ceiling Maine's statute sets and we do not request exceptions to it
About Portland ME Roof Pros in Portland, ME
Portland ME Roof Pros works Portland, South Portland, Westbrook, Scarborough, Falmouth and Cape Elizabeth, out through Gorham and Windham to Bridgton, and south to Saco and Arundel. Residential replacement and repair, standing seam metal, low-slope membrane, ventilation, gutters, and the fascia, soffit and cornice work at the roof edge that decides what a job in this city actually costs.
The reason we organize the business around that edge is arithmetic rather than ideology. The American Community Survey puts roughly 47 percent of Portland's housing at 1939 or earlier, against about 24 percent across Cumberland County as a whole. On buildings that old the trim carries pre-1978 paint, and both the federal renovation rule and Maine's own statutory duty to prevent releasing lead change what the job is the moment enough of it is disturbed.
Some jobs are not ours to take. A small patch on a roof with four good years left is a two-hundred-dollar handyman call and we will tell you so. A historic slate or copper restoration belongs to a specialist trade and we will give you a name rather than pretend.
And if your paint film is continuous and the wood behind it rings solid, the right spend on your cornice this year is nothing at all, which we will write on the estimate before we leave.
How It Works
- 1
Free Inspection With Your Build Year Attached
We pull your parcel from the City of Portland assessor's property search and print the year built on the front of the report, because that single number decides more about your project than the shingle brand does. Then every plane gets walked or shot with a pole camera, and the covering and the perimeter trim get graded separately.
- 2
Two Prices, Not One Lump Sum
The estimate carries a field number and a roof-edge number. The field is tear-off, deck, underlayment and covering. The edge is fascia, rake, soffit and cornice, priced with the run of painted trim we intend to remove written down in feet. You can buy one, both, or neither, and the arithmetic is visible either way.
- 3
A Contract Written to Maine's Statute
Above $3,000 the Home Construction Contracts Act requires the agreement in writing and signed before anyone starts, with commencement and completion dates, the payment method, a deposit no larger than one third, a description of work and materials, the statutory warranty paragraph and your election of how disputes get resolved. Ours contains all of it.
- 4
Containment, Cleanup and a Verified Close-Out
Where the scope crosses into painted surfaces, a certified renovator is on site, the ground is sheeted or shielded vertically where the lot is too tight for ten feet, no powered tool runs without shrouded HEPA extraction, nothing gets torched, and the day ends with a documented cleaning verification rather than a broom.
Commercial and Multi-Unit Roofing in Portland and Across Southern Maine
We roof mixed-use blocks downtown, converted mill space, medical and professional offices, industrial buildings out toward Riverside, and a good deal of Portland's apartment stock. Two lines cut through that list that owners rarely expect. The federal renovation rule reaches a pre-1978 commercial building the moment a licensed child care or pre-kindergarten tenant makes it a child-occupied facility.
And Maine's Home Construction Contracts Act stops at three living units, so a four-unit building gets none of the statutory warranty, deposit cap or dispute election a duplex on the same street receives. We write those protections into the contract instead of leaving you without them.
- ✓Mechanically-attached and fully-adhered TPO in 60 and 80 mil, and fully-adhered EPDM
- ✓Two-ply cold-applied modified bitumen; we do not torch on occupied or pre-1978 buildings
- ✓Tapered polyisocyanurate designed to move standing water to the outlet rather than around it
- ✓Roof hatches, curbs, rails and equipment penetrations flashed and counterflashed, never sealed
- ✓Child-occupied facility screening on every pre-1978 building before a scope is written
- ✓Roof registers for portfolios: area, system, age, remaining life and repair-or-replace, refreshed yearly
- ✓Payment tied to defined milestones with the change-order procedure written into the contract
- ✓Night and weekend work where the tenancy requires it, and no unit left open overnight
Service Areas
Portland ME Roof Pros serves Portland, ME and surrounding communities including:
Recent Projects Across southern Maine
Frequently Asked Questions
Does replacing a roof in Portland trigger the lead paint rules?
Usually not, and that surprises people. Stripping and re-covering the field of a roof disturbs no painted surface, so it sits outside the rule entirely no matter how old the house is. What pulls a job in is touching the trim: removing fascia, rake or soffit on a pre-1978 building counts the whole surface area of the component you take off, and one long rake board can pass the twenty-square-foot exterior threshold on its own.
How do I find out what year my house was built?
The City of Portland assessor publishes a property search with year built on every parcel, and it is free to use. If the record shows 1978 or later, none of this applies to you and the conversation is a straightforward roofing conversation. If it shows earlier, ask any contractor bidding your job how they intend to handle the trim, and see whether they have an answer.
Does Maine license roofing contractors?
No. Maine issues no state roofing license and no general contractor license, so a Maine contractor license number offered for roofing work is a number nobody issues. Two things are real instead: the Home Construction Contracts Act, which governs your paperwork, and firm certification under the federal renovation rule, which is required before anyone disturbs paint on a pre-1978 dwelling for money. Ask to see the second one.
How much can a Maine contractor ask for as a deposit?
No more than one third of the total contract price. That cap is written into the Home Construction Contracts Act and it is not negotiable by agreement. A roofer asking for half up front on a Portland house is asking you to waive a statutory protection, and a violation of that chapter is prima facie evidence of an unfair trade practice under Maine law.
Can you tell me whether my house has lead paint?
No, and neither can any other roofer. Under Maine law a lead hazard may only be identified by a Maine-licensed lead inspector or risk assessor. What we can tell you is your build year, the condition of the painted surfaces we can see from a ladder, and whether the work you are considering would disturb more than the threshold allows. Those are contractor questions and we answer them in writing.
My building is a three-family. Do the same contract rules apply?
Yes, at three units. The statute defines a residence as a dwelling with three or fewer living units, so a duplex and a triple-decker both get the written contract, the deposit cap and the statutory warranty language. A four-unit building on the same street gets none of it, and neither does anything used for business, which is why our multi-unit contracts spell out milestones, change orders and warranty terms by agreement instead.