Roofing in Johnson City, Tennessee

First, the county, because the whole internet gets this wrong: Johnson City is in Washington County. Bristol and Kingsport are Sullivan. Elizabethton is Carter. If a roofing website tells you Johnson City is in Sullivan County, it was not written by anybody who has been here.

Storm damage, and what we can and cannot do about your claim

One thing about Johnson City that is on a map rather than in somebody's opinion: ASCE 7-16, the standard the building code uses for wind, puts Johnson City and Elizabethton inside a Special Wind Region — an area where the ordinary mapped wind speed is not considered reliable because of the terrain. Bristol and Kingsport are not in one. It is worth knowing when a contractor tells you every roof in the Tri-Cities is the same job.

That wind finds a lifted rake edge or a ridge cap that was fastened carelessly. It is an argument for proper edge detailing on an exposed lot rather than for a more expensive shingle.

What we do after a storm: get on the roof, photograph what is actually up there, and hand you a written report with the damage marked and dated. That report is yours. You give it to your insurer, or to a licensed public adjuster if you decide to hire one. Then we do the repair or the replacement.

What we will not do, and be wary of any roofer who offers to: contact your carrier to argue the scope, tell you what your policy covers, meet the adjuster as your representative, or promise you an outcome. Negotiating a claim on your behalf is public adjusting, a licensed profession in Tennessee, and a roofing contractor doing it is doing someone else's job. Your deductible is yours to pay, too — anyone offering to waive it, absorb it or discount their invoice to cover it is describing insurance fraud, and it is your name on the claim.

Four Johnson Citys, four kinds of roof

• The Tree Streets. The historic neighborhood west of downtown, streets named after trees, houses largely from the first third of the twentieth century. Steep, gabled, porched, sometimes turreted. Two things go wrong repeatedly: the low-slope porch roofs, which are shallower than modern shingles are rated for and back water up no matter how well they were laid, and the flashing where all those dormers and walls meet the roof.
• Around ETSU. A large share of it rental. Different economics entirely — a landlord holding a house indefinitely buys three or four shingle roofs across the life of one metal one, and a leak in a tenanted property is an obligation rather than an inconvenience.
• Boones Creek. Farms and older houses giving way to subdivisions. Plank decking and two or three shingle layers on the old places; simple, cohort-aged builder shingle on the new.
• Gray. Technically its own community and firmly in the county, growing fast off the interstate exit, and a place people constantly assume is inside the city. It is not.

Johnson City is inside a Special Wind Region. That is a real thing.

This is not local folklore, it is on the map in the standard the building code points to. ASCE 7-16 — the wind and snow standard behind the IRC — draws parts of the country as Special Wind Regions, meaning the ordinary mapped wind speed is not considered reliable there because the terrain does things to the wind that a national map cannot capture. Johnson City and Elizabethton are inside one. Kingsport and Bristol are not.

What that means in practice is that a national rule of thumb about wind is worth less here than it is thirty miles north, and that local judgement about edges, fastening and ridge detail is not a sales story. It is also consistent with what we see: storm failures on roofs in this town start at the rakes, the ridge and the first course above the eave far more often than in the middle of the roof.

On snow, Johnson City publishes a ground snow load of 15 pounds per square foot, and so does Washington County. Worth knowing: that mapped value only holds up to about 2,600 feet of elevation. Johnson City sits around 1,631 feet, so it is comfortably inside that — but the high country east of here is not, and a roof up there needs a site-specific look rather than a number off a table.

Winter is a freeze-thaw story rather than a deep-cold one. Tri-Cities Airport records about 94 nights a year at or below freezing and only 7.4 days where the high stays below freezing, so roughly 87 times a winter a roof here freezes overnight and thaws by afternoon. That is what causes ice at cold overhangs and the winter leaks in older attics that were never insulated with any of this in mind. And on hail, the Weather Service office at Morristown puts the peak in May, with damaging wind taking over in June and again in November.

Getting here

About half an hour from our shop, straight down I-81 to I-26. US-11E is the older road down through Bluff City and Piney Flats, US-19E runs east toward Elizabethton, and TN-381 handles the middle of town. The Tweetsie Trail runs the ten miles between here and Elizabethton, which gives you a fair sense of how close those two towns really are.

What we do most in Johnson City

Every roofing service we offer in Johnson City

Whatever your roof needs, it is the same crew and the same phone number. These pages explain how we do each one:

• Roof Replacement — Full tear-off and a complete new roof system
• Roof Repair — Leaks, flashing, valleys and blown-off shingles
• Metal Roofing — Standing seam and exposed-fastener panels
• Shingle Roofing — Architectural asphalt shingles
• Storm & Hail Damage — Documentation and insurance claim help
• Roof Inspection — Free, honest assessment with photos
• Emergency Roofing — Tarping and same-day leak stops
• Gutters — Seamless gutters, guards and downspouts
• Commercial & Flat Roofing — TPO and low-slope systems

Towns next door

We are on roofs all over this end of the state, and Johnson City sits right in the middle of a run we make constantly:

• Roofing in Jonesborough, TN — ten minutes west, the oldest town in Tennessee
• Roofing in Gray, TN — north on I-26, and firmly in the county rather than the city
• Roofing in Elizabethton, TN — fifteen minutes east into Carter County, at the other end of the Tweetsie Trail
• Roofing in Erwin, TN — south down I-26 into Unicoi County and the Nolichucky gorge

Worth reading before you call anybody

• Do You Have to Remove Old Shingles? — why going over the top costs you more than it saves
• Roof Repair vs. Replacement — how we judge where the line is on an older Tree Streets house
• Roof & Attic Ventilation — the actual cause of most winter leaks in old houses