A dingbat fourplex off Freeman Ave with a cap sheet that had gone brittle at the parapet, ponding water on a dead-flat deck and staining the ceiling of a second-floor unit. That's a normal Tuesday for us. Those 1960s apartment runs along Inglewood Ave need mod-bit or TPO, not shingle, and plenty of owners find that out the hard way after somebody patches them with the wrong material.
Single-family work here is a different animal. The Holly Glen and Del Aire ranch tracts went up for Northrop and aerospace families, and they're the same build as Inglewood Knolls — low 3-in-12 comp shingle laid over skip sheathing. Shallow pitch plus spaced boards means wind-driven rain gets under the courses instead of running off. We come down Prairie or Crenshaw most mornings, and the 105 gets us across town quick.
Working on Hawthorne's low-slope and flat roofs
My house has a really low roof pitch. Does that change the shingle I need?
It does. On a 3-in-12 the underlayment and the way valleys and edges are detailed matter more than the shingle itself. We'll check whether there's skip sheathing under there, since that usually means new decking before anything goes on.
Do you handle flat apartment roofs, not just houses?
Yes. The flat cap-sheet decks on the older Inglewood Ave and Freeman Ave buildings are mod-bit or TPO work, and we inspect drains and parapet flashing as part of that.