We have a variety of roofing options available to our customers including traditional asphalt shingles and metal roofing. If you are looking to have a new asphalt shingle roof installed we recommend 30-year GAF Timberline architectural shingles. GAF has been the leader in the roof shingle business since 1886. GAF also provides their customers with one of the roofing industry’s most comprehensive warranties.

For our customers that are looking for other roofing options besides traditional asphalt shingles, we’ve got them! We would be happy to show you the great metal roofing products available from top manufactures like ATAS, ASP, and METALWORKS by Tamko. Our professional installers our masters at installing faux slate metal roofing and traditional standing seam metal roofing.

BCI also does flat roofs. Special care and attention needs to be taken when installing a flat rubber roof and our installers do it right the first time, every time! Let us give you a free estimate for a new EPDM type flat roof. We install these types of roofs on both residential properties and commercial properties. Our certified installers will make sure that your new flat roof is installed properly and quickly!

BCI Contracting provides our customers with many different options for exterior siding as well. Crane, Certainteed, and Mastic vinyl siding are the best brands on the market and BCI provides and installs all of them for our customers. BCI offers clapboard style vinyl siding or the more decorative Cedar Impressions vinyl siding.

Another siding option that many people are interested in is fiber cement siding such as Hardie Plank siding. This product is a cement based siding that looks and installs just like traditional clapboard siding. When you combine Azek trim with fiber cement siding you give your home’s exterior a combination that’s hard to beat in terms of looks and durability.

Of course we also install beautiful, traditional wood siding. We provide traditional cedar clapboard siding installations as well as cedar shake siding installations. At BCI we are able to install any type of siding you would like on your home’s exterior.

To top everything off, we are happy to provide our customers with an unbeatable installation warranty in addition to all manufactures warranties. All of our roofing and siding installations are backed up by our comprehensive 20-year labor warranty.

We appreciate you considering us for your next siding or roofing project! Just fill out the short form to the right or visit our online estimate page today!

Thanks for visiting us here at BCI Contracting, Inc. and we look forward to serving you!

We have a variety of roofing options available to our customers including traditional asphalt shingles and metal roofing. If you are looking to have a new asphalt shingle roof installed we recommend 30-year GAF Timberline architectural shingles. GAF has been the leader in the roof shingle business since 1886. GAF also provides their customers with one of the roofing industry’s most comprehensive warranties.

For our customers that are looking for other roofing options besides traditional asphalt shingles, we’ve got them! We offer metal roofing from the best manufactures like ATAS, ASP, and METALWORKS by Tamko. Faux slate metal roofing and traditional standing seam metal roofing are great options for your home’s next roof!

BCI also does flat roofs. Special care and attention needs to be taken when installing a flat rubber roof and our installers do it right the first time, every time! Just ask us about our EPDM rubber roofing installations. Our master installers will make sure that your new flat roof is installed properly and quickly.

As far as exterior siding goes we offer many different options there as well. We offer the top brands of vinyl siding including Crane, Certainteed, and Mastic. If you’re interested in traditional clapboard style vinyl siding or the more decorative Cedar Impressions style, you won’t be disappointed. We install both of these types of vinyl siding as well as others.

Fiber cement siding such as Hardie Plank siding is another great option. This product is a cement based siding that looks and installs just like traditional clapboard siding. Pairing up fiber cement siding with Azek brand solid PVC trim boards is an exterior siding solution that is hard to beat.

If you are interested in more traditional siding don’t worry! We install that as well. We would be happy to install cedar clapboard siding or cedar shake siding on your home. We can provide a siding solution to match any customers’ needs.

To top everything off, we are happy to provide our customers with an unbeatable installation warranty in addition to all manufactures warranties. All of our roofing and siding installations come with an industry leading 20-year labor warranty. We appreciate you considering us for your next siding or roofing project! Just fill out the short form to the right or visit our online estimate page today!

Thanks for visiting us here at BCI Contracting, Inc. and we look forward to serving you!

We have a variety of roofing options available to our customers including traditional asphalt shingles and metal roofing. We recommend 30-year GAF Timberline architectural shingles for our customers looking for a new asphalt shingle roof. A leader in the roofing industry since 1886, GAF backs their roofing products with one of the industry’s best, most comprehensive warranties.

For our customers that are looking for other roofing options besides traditional asphalt shingles, BCI Contracting also installs metal roofing. We offer metal roofing from the best manufactures like ATAS, ASP, and METALWORKS by Tamko. Faux slate metal roofing and traditional standing seam metal roofing are great options for your home’s next roof!

BCI also does flat roofs. Special care and attention needs to be taken when installing a flat rubber roof and our installers do it right the first time, every time! Let us give you a free estimate for a new EPDM type flat roof. We install these types of roofs on both residential properties and commercial properties. Our installers are seasoned roofing professionals that will make sure your new flat roof installation is done properly.

When you choose BCI you will also have many different siding options available to you for your home’s exterior. Crane, Certainteed, and Mastic vinyl siding are the best brands on the market and BCI provides and installs all of them for our customers. If you’re interested in traditional clapboard style vinyl siding or the more decorative Cedar Impressions style, you won’t be disappointed. We install both of these types of vinyl siding as well as others.

Fiber cement siding such as Hardie Plank siding is another great option. This type of siding looks just like cedar clapboard siding and the installation procedure is almost identical. When you combine Azek trim with fiber cement siding you give your home’s exterior a combination that’s hard to beat in terms of looks and durability.

As well as the vinyl and fiber cement siding options we, of course, also do beautiful wood siding installations. We would love to install cedar clapboard or cedar shake siding on your home for you. The bottom line is that we here at BCI Contracting can install just about any type of siding you would like for the exterior of your home!

As far as labor warranties go we know we offer one of the best in the siding and roofing industry. All of our roofing and siding installations are backed up by our comprehensive 20-year labor warranty. We appreciate you considering us for your next siding or roofing project! Just fill out the short form to the right or visit our online estimate page today!

Thanks for visiting us here at BCI Contracting, Inc. and we look forward to serving you!

There are many different roofing options available to our customers. If you are looking to have a new asphalt shingle roof installed we recommend 30-year GAF Timberline architectural shingles. GAF is the leading manufacturer of asphalt roofing shingles and provides their customers with the industry’s most comprehensive warranty. You can’t go wrong with GAF shingles installed by BCI Contracting’s professional installers!

For our customers that are looking for other roofing options besides traditional asphalt shingles, we’ve got them! We would be happy to show you the great metal roofing products available from top manufactures like ATAS, ASP, and METALWORKS by Tamko. Our professional installers our masters at installing faux slate metal roofing and traditional standing seam metal roofing.

Do you install flat roofs as well? Yes we do! We would be happy to provide you with a free estimate for an EPDM rubber roof installation for your home or business. Our master installers will make sure that your new flat roof is installed properly and quickly.

BCI Contracting provides our customers with many different options for exterior siding as well. Crane, Certainteed, and Mastic are the top manufactures of vinyl siding and we offer and install all of them. Whether you’re looking for traditional clapboard style vinyl siding or the more decorative Cedar Impressions style we provide and install it.

Another siding option that many people are interested in is fiber cement siding such as Hardie Plank siding. This cement based siding installs and looks just like traditional cedar clapboard siding. When you install Azek trim together with fiber cement siding you create a combination that is truly hard to beat as far as your home’s exterior goes.

Of course we also install beautiful, traditional wood siding. We would be happy to install cedar clapboard siding or cedar shake siding on your home. At BCI we are able to install any type of siding you would like on your home’s exterior.

Of course our customers need a great warranty to go along with the great products we provide and install. All of our roofing and siding installations come with an industry leading 20-year labor warranty. We hope you consider us for your next roofing or siding project! Just fill out the short form to the right or visit our online estimate page today!

Thanks for visiting us here at BCI Contracting, Inc. and we look forward to serving you!

We offer our customers many different types of roofing options. For our customers looking to have an asphalt shingle roof installed we recommend 30-year GAF Timberline architectural shingles. GAF has been the leader in the roof shingle business since 1886. GAF also provides their customers with one of the roofing industry’s most comprehensive warranties.

Maybe your not looking for an asphalt shingle roof. We have you covered there as well. We here at BCI are proud to offer our customers quality metal roofing products from ATAS, ASP, and METALWORKS by Tamko. Whether your interested in a traditional standing seam metal roof or faux slate metal roofing we can provide and install a product to fit your needs.

You say you have a flat roof? No problem! Just ask us about our EPDM rubber roofing installations. Our certified installers will make sure that your new flat roof is installed properly and quickly!

As far as exterior siding goes we offer many different options there as well. We offer the top brands of vinyl siding including Crane, Certainteed, and Mastic. BCI offers clapboard style vinyl siding or the more decorative Cedar Impressions vinyl siding.

Fiber cement siding such as Hardie Plank siding is another great option for your home’s exterior. This product is a cement based siding that looks and installs just like traditional clapboard siding. Pairing up fiber cement siding with Azek brand solid PVC trim boards is an exterior siding solution that is hard to beat.

If you are interested in more traditional siding don’t worry! We install that as well. We provide traditional cedar clapboard siding installations as well as cedar shake siding installations. We can provide a siding solution to match any customers’ needs.

To top everything off, we are happy to provide our customers with an unbeatable installation warranty in addition to all manufactures warranties. BCI Contracting, Inc. gives our customers a 20-year labor warranty on all of our roofing and siding installations. Are you ready for your free estimate? Just fill out the short form to the right or visit our online estimate page today!

Thanks for visiting us here at BCI Contracting, Inc. and we look forward to serving you!

Welcome to BCI Contracting, Inc. We are a siding and roofing contractor serving most of Massachusetts. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome residents of Dedham, Massachusetts and the surrounding communities of Boston, Newton, Needham, Dover, Westwood, Canton, and Milton.

If you have a need for roofing, vinyl siding, or cedar siding services you came to the right place. You may request a free estimate from us here. You will also find our contact info to the right if you prefer to call us directly.

I invite you to check out some more of our blog (you’re reading it now!), it has many articles relating to the roofing and siding industry here in Massachusetts and abroad. You may also want to check out our about us page to get some detailed information about our company.

Again welcome! We look forward to continuing to serve your communities for years to come.

According to our main roofing materials supplier, Allied Building Products Corp., a 10% price increase on all asphalt related roofing materials is due in March. Although 10% may not seem like much, this increase comes on the heels of a year that saw asphalt roofing material prices raised by as much as 30%.

Why the increase? Well, if you ask roofing material manufactures such as GAF or Certainteed they will site increased oil prices as the main reason. Oil is one of the main raw materials in asphalt shingles and other roofing materials such as “Ice & Water” barrier and tar paper underlayment. Of course oil also affects how much it costs these manufactures to ship their product across the country.

The installation cost (labor cost), of a new roof has remained relatively unchanged over the last few years and I expect that to stay the same throughout 2009. The reason for this is the large amount of competition in the roofing contractor industry. Roofing is one of the most competitive markets in the construction industry and this fact obviously benefits homeowners, especially in this economy, as far as keeping a check on labor cost. However, roofing contractors have no say in the cost of roofing materials and because the labor costs have already more or less bottomed out, homeowners can expect that any increase in material prices will have to be passed on to you the homeowner.

So the bottom line is that it will soon be costing close to $90 per square of 30-year architect asphalt shingles (1 square = 100 square feet). To put this in perspective, in 2007 these same shingles cost between $62-$67 per square, that’s a huge jump in a short amount of time. Also, the numbers I just mentioned are only for shingles. There are other materials that are involved in a properly done pitched roof such as “Ice & Water” barrier, metal drip-edge, ridge venting, and tar-paper. All told expect to pay between $140-$160 per square just for the materials to do your roof after the latest manufacturer price increases.

Do you need a new roof? You’ve got about a month before it is going to cost you a bit more to have it done. Even if you want to wait until spring to have it installed, you may want to consider signing with a roofing contractor now and having the materials delivered to your house and then installed in spring in order to take advantage of the current prices.

We here at BCI Contracting, Inc. would like to welcome all Medway, Massachusetts residents and businesses to our website. We are proud to offer our siding and roofing contractor services to your community and the neighboring towns of Millis, Franklin, Bellingham, Milford, Holliston, and Norfolk. In addition, we also provide seamless aluminum gutter services if you have a need.

Our actual service area is most of Massachusetts, particularly Norfolk County and the Metrowest. We like to make it a point to provide a page on our website for each of the towns that we serve. That’s what this page is for Medway, and we invite you to leave comments and/or questions!

If you have a need of any of the services we offer please use our get an estimate page or just give us a call (contact info on the right), we would be happy to come out and provide you with a timely, free estimate at your convenience.

You should find our website easy to navigate with the main menu bar at the top of the page and when on the blog section of our site (like now) you will see a menu to the right that is specific to the blog areas of the site.

We look forward to continuing to serve your community!

Welcome all Wellesley, Massachusetts residents to our roofing and siding blog and website. We are BCI Contracting, Inc. a full service siding and roofing contractor. We are proud to offer our siding and roofing services to Wellesley residents and businesses as well as the surrounding communities of Natick, Weston, Newton, Needham, and Dover.

We provide all types of roofing services including: asphalt shingle roofing, standing seam metal roofing, slate and tile roofing, and EPDM rubber roofing for flat roofs. As far as siding we offer: vinyl siding, cedar clapboard siding, cedar shake siding, and Hardi siding. In addition we are also able to provide seamless aluminum gutter installations if you have a need.  You can request a free estimate online or just give us a call.

Our website is easy to navigate. You will find a menu bar at the top of every page that will bring you to all of the main areas of our site. While you are visiting the blog area of our site you will see a menu on the right, below our contact info, that is for navigating our blog.

Again welcome and we look forward to continuing to providing our services to your communities for many more years to come.

Here we are in the midst of another cold Massachusetts winter and like every winter here in New England many property owners will have major issues with ice dams causing roof leaks and shingle damage.

Although it may seem as though ice dams are an unstoppable force of nature, they are actually quite preventable. Attics and cathedral or vaulted ceiling areas that have been correctly incorporated into the overall building envelope don’t have problems with ice dams and icicles in the cold seasons. Through the use of proper insulation and ventilation techniques ice dams can be stopped cold (pun intended).

Here a typical scenario for the formation of ice dams:

1. A house has a build up of snow on the roof.
2. The temperature outside is below freezing.
3. The temperature inside the attic is above freezing, thus raising the temperature of the roof itself to above freezing.
4. Because of the warm roof, the snow on top of it begins to melt from the bottom up.
5. This melted snow water tries to run down and off the roof.
6. As soon as the water reaches the edge of the roof it gets exposed to the freezing air.
7. The water refreezes as ice instead of snow in the gutters, if present, and along the edges of the roof.
8. As more and more melted snow water continues to run down the roof it just keeps freezing behind and on top of the previously frozen run off, forming a bigger and bigger ice dam.

So How Do Ice Dams Cause Roof Leaks?

The melted snow water doesn’t immediately freeze anymore after the ice dam has begun to take shape. Once the ice dam has built up a bit it literally creates a dam that traps the rest of the water trying to run off the roof behind it. While this trapped water will eventually freeze, it may take a while and during that time a portion of the shingles on this roof, behind the ice dam, are basically submerged in water.

Now of course your roof shingles are obviously suppose to protect your home from the weather i.e. rain and snow. However, most roofing materials are not meant to have a pond or river on top of them.

So What Can You Do To Prevent Ice Dams?

First and foremost you must recognize that proper insulation and ventilation is the key(see image on right). If we are talk about an attic area then typically this means that the insulation needs to run up the walls of your house then over the attic floor joists forming an ideal insulation envelope. In the attic scenario only the floor of the attic should be insulated, not the underside of the roof!

Proper ventilation is also required. Outside air needs to be able to enter the attic so that the attic temperature is the same as the temperature outside. You achieve this ventilation through the use of gable vents, soffit vents and a roof ridge vent.

In roof systems with attic areas below them it is fairly straight forward to have a contractor that knows what they are doing to correct any problems as far as proper insulation and ventilation. However, roof systems with a cathedral ceiling below them that have these issues are much more of a project to correct, but they can be corrected.

In order to have a properly ventilated and insulated cathedral ceiling the contractor must install baffles within each rafter bay before installing the insulation. These baffles (picture on the left) allow air to flow between the soffit vents and the ridge vent which keeps the underside of the roof the same temperature as outside. If these baffles ore not installed in your cathedral ceiling then the contractor will need to remove the existing sheetrock and insulation from your ceiling in order to properly ventilate the area. This type of project will be more expensive than an attic project.

In addition to the ice dam issue, if your attic is warmer than the outside temperature you are also wasting lots of money heating that space. So basically you are paying extra money on your heating bill for the privilege of growing nice big ice dams and icicles that cause roof leaks and destroy your roof. Kind of makes it even worse when you think of it that way doesn’t it?

What Can You Do About Existing Ice Dams?

If it’s the middle of the winter and you have ice dams or through past experience you think they will be forming soon there are some measures you can take. First of all, if you don’t have experience climbing on a roof in the winter, especially with snow on it, don’t do it! Call a pro. What you can do is go to your local hardware store and buy a snow rake that has an extendable handle designed to pull snow off of the first few feet of the roof and attempt to pull some of that snow off, from the ground, before it has a chance to melt and refreeze along the roof edges. You can also do this once the ice dam has formed and keep it from getting any bigger and give it a chance to melt, hopefully.

Also, many roofing contractors, us included, work through the winter and often provide roof snow removal services in addition to their typical roofing services. This is a service we are happy to provide for our customers here in Massachusetts, for example. Again, please don’t try and do this yourself. Between icy ladders and slippery roof surfaces it is a recipe for disaster for the inexperienced.

There are also some products on the market that can assist in preventing ice dams before they form and melting them if they have already formed. You should be able to find a home improvement store in your area that sells a product that is basically a coated, heated wire that you fasten along the edges of the roof and then plug in when the conditions are right for the ice dams to form (see picture on right). These actually work pretty good, however, they aren’t solving the real problem which, of course, is ventilation and insulation issues. They may be right for some homes in some circumstances though.

Most home improvement and hardware stores also sell pellets or tablets that are designed to be thrown up onto the roof from the ground. These tablets then supposedly will melt the ice from the roof as they dissolve into the water that is running down the roof into the ice dam. I have no experience with these products so I can’t say for certain if they work as designed or not. However, some people say they have worked for their ice dam problems. A couple of things I would be worried about as a roofing contractor is potential damage to the shingles from the chemicals these tablets are made of (salt is no good for asphalt shingles), as well as possibly staining the roof with those same chemicals. And even in a best case situation this product is still just a band-aid for a greater problem.

Proper Roofing Techniques For Cold Climates

In addition to making sure that the roof has proper ventilation and attic insulation there is an additional level of security against ice dam issues and roof leaks that all responsible and ethical roofing contractors should be taking in cold weather climates with regards to pitched, asphalt shingled roofs. When a new roof is installed, these days, an extra layer of protection called ice and water membrane should be installed from the edge to at least 3 feet up the roof.

This added layer of protection will help prevent leaks if ice dams do develop along the roof edges. Ice and water membrane will not prevent ice dams it simply is added security to help protect the plywood sheathing beneath the asphalt shingles and prevent leaks should an ice dam form.

If you are still looking for more information you might find this article on the causes and cures for ice dams useful. Good luck to you and your home this winter and remember that the key to preventing ice dams is proper ventilation and insulation!

If you would like to discuss this article or have any questions please feel free to leave a comment in the comment section or drop me an email. I am part of the team here at BCI Contracting, Inc. in Massachusetts. We specialize in roofing and siding and serve most of Massachusetts. We are always happy to provide free roofing and siding estimates just use our online estimate form or give us a call.