Built Local
Bethesda’s Roofs Are Older Than They Look
Most of Bethesda’s housing stock went up between the late 1930s and the mid-1960s — brick colonials in Westmoreland Hills and Edgemoor, ramblers and split-levels in Wyngate, Ayrlawn and Alta Vista, and Cape Cods tucked through Glen Echo Heights. Many of these homes are on their third or fourth roof, and we regularly find two full layers of shingles hiding under the top one, plank decking with gaps that modern shingles were never designed for, and 60-year-old attic ventilation that bakes shingles from underneath.
Add Bethesda’s famous tree canopy — gorgeous in October, brutal in a thunderstorm — and you get a very specific local pattern: limb punctures, gutter systems crushed by falling branches, moss and algae streaking on shaded north-facing slopes, and flashing failures around the chimneys and additions that nearly every home in 20814, 20816 and 20817 has picked up over the decades.