Some projects call for just the right product and just the right installer. For the re-roofing of The Inn at The Colonnade in Baltimore, Drexel Metals and Tecta America East teamed up for a safe, successful, attractive and watertight installation.

Working 125 feet in the air, installing metal panels on open framing at steep slopes of 8:12 and 10:12, Tecta America East crews spent a lot of time staging … lifts, scaffolding and safety equipment were vital to the success of the project. The facility houses a luxury hotel as well as high-end condominiums, meaning the install had to work around the schedules of the hotel as well as the condo board.

“The biggest challenge was access,” says Steve Coyne, vice president at Tecta America East. “It’s an occupied building, so we had to always be aware of events going on at the hotel. I’d estimate that half the time we were there was spent staging, erecting and taking down scaffolding, ensuring a safe installation.”

Leaking gutters and a batten seam metal roofing system that was losing its paint forced the owners to replace the gutters and roofing. “We struggled to find the best metal roofing system for the project, including what gauge and seam height would work best,” Coyne says. “Ideally, we would have added metal decking to the open framing, but it was cost prohibitive. Drexel Metals offered some guidance and steered us to the best system.”

More than 27,000 square-feet of the company’s standing seam roofing was specified and installed. The panels, with a 1-3/4-inch standing seam height, featured a PVDF finish in Hemlock Green, similar to the color of the original panels. The open framing required a sturdier 22-gauge panel as opposed to a lighter and easier-to-work-with 24-gauge system. Clip spacing was determined by the existing purlins – most at 4-1/2 feet. Coyne says clips were closer together at the eaves and ridges.

Rick Wagner, RRC, CCS, vice president of Dedicated Roof and Hydro-Solutions LLC in Centreville, Va., was called in as a consultant/inspector during the actual roofing and gutter installation. “As with all re-roofing projects, you’re working on someone else’s imperfect framing,” Wagner says. “There were places where the structural steel framing was not perfectly aligned. Installation crews did a nice job of working around that. It’s a watertight system.”

The project was completed in March 2015.

“Issues with the leaking gutters was the impetus for making this project happen,” Wagner says. “The apron for the gutters went quite a ways up under the roofing panels, roofing clips went through the apron, so to replace the gutters and that apron, the roofing pretty much had to come off.”

Wagner says he also provided a cost analysis for repainting the roofing panels instead of replacing them, but the savings was not significant, mainly because of the difficulty involved with safe roof access for painters. “Once you take into consideration the new metal roofing system will long outlast the repainting, it was obvious that re-roofing was the best way to go,” Wagner says.

The gutters were a time-consuming part of the installation … wooden framing, covered by a peel-and-stick liner, housed the stainless steel gutters, which required soldering in some places. “That was all done by hand,” Wagner says. “Nothing was prefabricated.”

Wagner says the job was time-consuming, but to install a watertight gutter and roofing system safely at that height, working around occupied buildings, takes time. “I think Tecta did a really good job,” he says. “That system will serve the condos and hotel for a long time.”