10303 Katy Freeway: 30,000 SF of Gravel Roof, Renewed in Place

The challenge

Commercial property on the Katy Freeway corridor has a specific problem: the building has to keep earning while the roof gets fixed. This one is multi-tenant, it stayed fully operational, and its parking lots stayed full. That made the real challenge a coordination problem rather than a roofing one — working with every tenant, staging equipment and material without taking the parking they need, and keeping the job quiet and clean enough that the owner’s phone did not ring with complaints.

The roof was the familiar gravel-surfaced built-up assembly. Under the aggregate, the membrane had reached the point where patching was no longer buying anything.

What we did

We removed the gravel and spudded the surface smooth, then installed a fluid-applied system across the full 30,000 square feet. The existing roof still had structural value as a base, so it stayed and became part of the new assembly.

Gravel removal is the heavy end of the work. A truck-mounted commercial vacuum lifts the loose aggregate off, spud machines break out what is embedded in the asphalt below it, and then the crew vacuums again and hand-spuds the remainder until the surface is smooth enough to bond to. Gravel runs about 300 pounds per 1,000 square feet, so this roof was carrying somewhere around 9,000 pounds of rock. All of it comes off the structure for good, and it gets resold for driveways and gravel roof work rather than landfilled.

Working over an occupied building changes the sequencing more than it changes the system. Loud work and debris handling get scheduled around the tenants below, material moves when the lot is at its emptiest, and the roof is closed to weather at the end of every day — because at no point is the deck open.

Why it matters for the owner

No tear-off means no disposal cost, no crane time and no tenant disruption beyond the crew on the roof. For a property where every day of interruption is a real number, that is usually the deciding factor.

The finished surface is white and reflective, which in Houston is a measurable reduction in cooling load on a 30,000 square foot footprint — and a straightforward thing to put in front of a tenant or a buyer.

One note on upkeep: a white roof only saves energy while it stays white. Houston air puts dirt on a reflective surface over time, so plan on washing the roof every four to five years to hold it at maximum reflectivity and efficiency.

Have a roof like this one?

Harvest restores commercial roofs across the Houston area — fluid-applied roofing and waterproofing over metal, single ply, modified bitumen and gravel-surfaced built-up systems. If your roof is aging and you want to know what it actually needs, we will come look at it.

Harvest · (281) 259-7099 · office@teamhis.com · harvestroofs.com