Fellowship Plaza

Fellowship Plaza is a senior living facility in Saratoga, California, tucked in the hills of the South Bay Area, about 20 minutes from San Jose. The facility includes 150 apartments and a clubhouse used for socializing and entertaining. EAH Housing began planning to revamp the site’s buildings and landscaping in 2017, kicking off the work in early 2018.

The BT Roof team features deep expertise in reroofing multiunit residential facilities across the Bay Area. While the company boasts decades of experience, the Fellowship Plaza project included several hurdles that took roofing, scheduling, and project management expertise.

“The client was completely renovating the entire property on a very tight schedule with a lot of moving parts,” reports Senior Project Manager Bryce Davey.

The Bay Area was hit by torrential rain that winter, and the customer needed to maintain the schedule as they relocated the tenants to another facility during construction. The building was gutted, and the roof was essential to proceed with construction on all three floors. Because D+H Construction, the general contractor, was under such a tight deadline, the call was made to tent and waterproof Building One so BT could perform their scope of work. The decision was made to fully encapsulate the building with heat-welded plastic. The tenting was supported by scaffold legs placed throughout the field of the roof, roughly ten feet on center, creating a maze of steel posts throughout the entire roof area.

“We developed a system where we temporarily unscrewed each scaffold leg while adding additional support to the surrounding stanchions to get the existing built-up roofing torn off and hauled away,” Bryce explains. “Then we repeated the slow and steady process for installation of the new insulated TPO roof system. It was a new experience, performing a complete re-roof under a tent during an unrelenting series of storms. I give a lot of credit to the GC, D+H, for coordinating all the different trades to work harmoniously together in extremely challenging conditions.”

The project duration was just over one year, and there were multiple mobilizations. One key objective of the client was minimizing the time the tenants would be displaced in temporary housing. So, there was a major push to complete each building with minimal construction overlap to return the tenants to their homes as soon as possible.

The predominant roof system was a mechanically fastened ½” HD rigid insulation over tapered crickets, followed by a Carlisle .060mil TPO roof system. The canted walls received mechanically attached insulation followed by fully adhered TPO and terminated with a TPO-clad edge detail. There were also 5,000 square feet of standing seam metal panels at a 14:12 pitch on the third-story penthouse roofs.

On the community/office building, BT tore off the existing shingles, underlayment, gutters, and downspouts before installing 3,000 square feet of GAF Timberline composition shingles on the perimeter mansards. All gutters and downspouts were replaced as per specifications. The main roof of the clubhouse was a fully adhered TPO Roof system over R-30 and tapered insulation.

“This was a great project for BT, and we built lasting relationships with both the owners and the general contractor, as they were impressed with our ability to perform in very fluid and challenging conditions.”