Gonzalez Gym: 20,000 SF of Metal Roof Restored Without Tearing It Off

The challenge

A gymnasium roof is one of the least forgiving assemblies a building owner deals with. It is wide open inside, so a single fastener leak lands squarely on a hardwood floor. It is almost always in use. And when it is a curved, standing-profile metal roof like this one, the leak points are rarely in the field of the panel, they are at the seams, the fasteners and the transitions where the curve meets the perimeter.

Tearing off 20,000 square feet of metal would have meant an open building, a long schedule and a disposal bill. That was never the right answer here.

What we did

We restored the roof in place with a fluid-applied system installed directly over the existing metal. The panels stay where they are. The seams and fasteners get detailed first — fabric reinforcement is embedded at the seams, where the panels actually move — and then the full roof area receives the reflective fluid-applied coating.

That sequence is the whole point. Roof failures almost never start in the middle of a panel. They start at the details — the seams, the fasteners and the transitions where an accessory was needed to make a complete system and never got one. Detailing those first and then coating the entire field gives you one continuous surface with nothing left open to weather.

Why it matters for the building

The gym stayed usable. There was no tear-off, no landfill load, and no exposed deck waiting on weather. The finished surface is bright white, which is worth real money in a Houston summer: a reflective roof sends solar heat back up instead of pushing it into a space that is already hard to cool.

The owner also keeps the asset they already paid for. The metal deck is still doing its job — it just has a new, watertight, reflective surface on top of it.

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.