Parapet wall repair and rebuilds
The parapet is the run of wall standing above your roofline. It is exposed on both faces and along the top, nobody ever sees it, and it is where a great many top-floor leaks actually start.
Exposed on three sides
An ordinary wall gets weather on one face. A parapet wall gets it on the outside face, on the inside face where it rises above the roof, and across the top — and it has no roof over it to shed any of it.
That is three times the exposure on masonry that is usually the oldest and least maintained on the building, because getting up there to look at it requires actually getting on the roof. On Chicago two-flats, greystones and flat-roofed commercial buildings, this is the wall that quietly falls apart while everybody is looking at the front elevation.
Why your top-floor ceiling is staining
Water gets into a deteriorated parapet from the top and from both faces, saturates the wall, and then travels down and inward — arriving inside the building well below and well to the side of where it went in. This is why parapet leaks get misdiagnosed as roof leaks so consistently.
A roofing contractor replaces the roof field, the ceiling stain comes back in April, and everyone is annoyed. The roof was never the problem. The wall standing on top of the roof was.
Coping stones and the top of the wall
The top of a parapet is capped — with stone, with clay tile, or with metal — and that cap is doing the job a roof does everywhere else on the building. When the joints between coping stones open up, or a cap has shifted or gone missing, the wall is taking water straight down its core.
Resetting and repointing coping is a routine job and a cheap one relative to what it prevents. Left alone, the wall below it saturates, freezes, and comes apart from the inside, and then you are rebuilding rather than repointing.
Repair or rebuild
If the wall is sound and the mortar has gone, it is a repointing job with coping work on top. If the freeze-thaw has already broken down the brick itself, that section comes down to something solid and goes back up.
Because we do roofs as well, we can deal with the join where the parapet meets the roof membrane in the same visit — which is the other place these leaks come from, and the place two separate contractors will each tell you belongs to the other one.
Get a parapet wall price
Estimates are free and there is no obligation attached to one. Tell us what you are seeing and we will tell you what it actually needs.
What a failed parapet looks like from the roof
Everything described above is in these photos. The first is the gap that opens between the coping and the wall — that is the way in, and from the street below you would never know it was there. Water goes straight down the core of the wall from that joint and comes out on a ceiling well below and well to the side.
