If you live in Toronto, where the housing market has been expanding for a seemingly infinite number of years and properties are constantly being gutted and flipped — or outright demolished and rebuilt — you may have noticed the proliferation of flat roofed properties over the past decade. While there’s something classic and undeniably cozy about a good old fashioned pitched roof, there are also many obvious reasons that home owners’ appetites for flat roofs have grown recently. Here at Professional Roofers, we are in agreement with the public — we think flat roofs are great! We’ve been specializing in flat roofs for a very long time in order to meet the needs of their growing popularity, we also genuinely dig the trend!
First of all, they look awesome: flat roofs describe tasteful, clean lines with a decidedly modern vibe. If you go with a modern architect, there’s a very strong likelihood that you will end up with a flat roof to complement the clean, simple design of your home’s structure. In the east end of Toronto — which many consider the final frontier of the real estate market in Toronto — it is not uncommon to walk down a street and see the flat, clean roofs of the brand new homes interspersed freely amongst the pitched roofs of the old classics. If you want to see some great examples of this, take a stroll down Rhodes Avenue south of the Danforth someday.
Secondly, flat roofs facilitate more space in your home. The timeless look of a pitched roof includes the drawback of kneed walls, which can cramp a room and lead to nasty bumps on the head, as many of us have undoubtedly experienced. If you have an attic, you may not mind so much, since the kneed walls aren’t infringing on a living space, but in the GTA where the value of space is increasingly dear, most homeowner’s want to maximize the dimensions of their living space. If you choose to live in a flat roofed home, you will benefit from that luxurious sense of spaciousness that goes along with it — a welcome respite to the claustrophobia of the daily bustle of the city.
It is a widely propagated myth that a flat roof will lead to problems due to a build-up of precipitation. If you are moving into a place that it already built, you may want to hire a roofer to do a consultation to ensure that the roof is well designed. If it is, then precipitation — rain and melting snow — should roll right off it, away from the structure and foundation. In Toronto, where we often get a lot of snow, a thick, well engineered roof will have no problem holding a thick snowfall. Furthermore, the snow can act as extra insulation that can help to slightly reduce your heating bill, believe it or not. Something that we see often, though we plead with folks not to do this, is people getting up on their roofs to personally remove a heavy snowfall. Please, for heaven’s sake, do not do this, is is unnecessary and dangerous. If your roof was built with solid materials and properly engineered, trust us, it can hold the snow.
This post is certainly not meant to style shame those with pitched roofs into changing it up; there’s certainly something to be said for a classic, traditional look. If, on the other hand, you are a modern design junky who yearns for clean, slick lines, a home with a flat roof can be a beautiful thing.