Slate and tile roof repair on Atlanta's older homes

When a slate cracks or slides out of its course, the fix is a matched slate held with a copper slate hook or a copper nail and bib, not roofing cement. We source replacement slate by size, thickness and color, from salvage where the original quarry is gone, and slide it into place without disturbing the courses above. A handful of slipped slates usually points to nails that rusted through, so we check the pieces around each repair before calling it done.

Tile breaks under foot traffic and falling limbs, and cracked or displaced tiles let water reach the underlayment. We replace broken tiles with matching profiles, lift surrounding tiles carefully to reach fasteners, and refasten or clip loose pieces. Because the underlayment beneath tile does most of the waterproofing, we check it wherever a tile is lifted; if it has dried out and cracked across a section, lifting the tiles to replace it is the lasting repair rather than another patch on top.

Valley metal, chimney flashing and ridge details often wear out long before the slate or tile around them. We rebuild valleys in copper or heavy-gauge metal, replace step and counter-flashing at chimneys and walls, and reset ridge pieces in the method the roof was built with. Because the flashing is woven under the surrounding pieces, those pieces are removed by hand and reused wherever they come off intact, so a flashing repair does not turn into a roof of mismatched patches.