Albany Care Center
Albany, CA
The Albany Care Center is a satellite office of the Sutter East Bay Medical Foundation, where healthcare practitioners offer family medicine, diabetes services, women’s health and gynecology, LGBTQI+ care, and pediatric services.
Longtime BT Roof partners Skyline Engineering, Inc. called us to check the roof and start planning a complete tear-off and restoration that included a handful of tenant improvements.
Pre-construction meetings took on a more significant role at the beginning of this project since practitioners were actively treating patients. “There’s a plywood deck on a wood frame structure, and tear-off can be a little caveman-ish,” reports Senior Project Manager Ed Newman. “Noise and vibration travel down and can impact the people below. So, we had a lot of conversations before the work started, and Marty (Behrbaum, BT Superintendent) did a great job connecting regularly with Sutter’s onsite facilities engineer.”
| Location | Albany, CA |
| Client | Sutter Health |
| Scope | Reroof |
| Completed | 2024 |
| Size | 12,900-square-feet |
Another factor in the pre-construction days is that the building is off a busy street in Albany and has limited parking lot space. “It was just a matter of us talking through it with them,” Ed explains, “to make sure we didn’t disturb their operations and allow us to get our job done. Those conversations helped us through that with minimal issues and no work stoppages.”
An architectural feature on the building — metal sheets that acted as a roof fence — added a small bit of complexity to the job. BT needed to remove one to create a debris shoot. “While we were there, we did some material testing on those sheets and found lead paint on the perimeter counterflashing,” Ed says. “We brought in Conflo Services, Inc., a lead remediation company, to handle all that work.”
The tear-off went smoothly, and the crew found minimal damage to the plywood deck — four sheets needed replacing, which they did on a Saturday so as not to open the roof during clinic hours.
The 12 skylights, though, needed to be replaced. “It wasn’t part of the original scope, but Marty and I spoke with Sutter and Skyline and pointed out the skylight showed signs of stress fractures in the corners,” Ed reports. “We were concerned that lifting the skylights and wrapping the curbs could damage the skylights further. It’s always a good practice to replace old skylights while reroofing. It would be a shame to have a new roof and have a leak from a skylight.
“One of the things I’m most proud of with BT is that our focus is to do things the right way,” he continues. “There are a lot of times you could take an approach that would probably work, but it might not serve the client in the long run. In this example, because it turned out to be a larger change order, we educated the Sutter team on the benefits of changing the skylights with the 30-year warranty. It came down to helping them see that they might save some money, but it was possible that if we didn’t change it, they’d have problems with that skylight for the foreseeable future. Our goal every time is to be good stewards of the owners and their properties.”
Given the varying weather conditions and Albany’s dew point during the summer months, the BT crew took care to tear off only as much as they could cover that day and work from ridge to drains. The goal is always to have the daily tie-in aimed down slope so water does not buck up against it.
That type of planning and work cycle, Ed adds, goes into the pre-construction report he writes up and gives to the client and people working in the building. “It helps the people working below us to understand that we’ll be there for a limited time,” he says. “We have a plan, and we’ll move as fast as we can. I think it helps them deal with everything when they know it will only be for a couple of days at a time.”
Once the BT crew completed the setup, they started the roof restoration by installing a new cover board and an adhered Sarnafil® G 410-80 Feltback EnergySmart system.
Planning, communication, and a strong partnership with Skyline and Sutter made the process run smoothly. Even with the skylight change order, we completed the project within the four-week project timeline.
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