LoHi Multi-Family Re-Roof — 13 Buildings, 750 Squares

This is a 13-building, 750-square multi-family community re-roof in the Lower Highland (LoHi) neighborhood of Denver. When a hail claim opened a full roof replacement across the property, the scope and the setting added up to something unusual for a residential project: we had to formally close a street to get the job done safely. It's the only roof project in our history that required a city street closure.

Why a Street Had to Close

LoHi is one of Denver's densest urban-infill neighborhoods. The site is tight — buildings share walls, setbacks are small, and the surrounding blocks are mixed residential and small-commercial with on-street parking that turns over constantly. The buildings themselves are tall enough (three and four stories) that ground-to-roof material handling requires a telehandler operating at full reach. There wasn't a private-property footprint on site big enough to stage a telehandler, a material truck, shingle bundles, and tear-off debris without blocking the only paths pedestrians and residents used.

The only safe answer was to close a side street. We pulled the permit, posted advance-notice signs, coordinated with the City of Denver on pedestrian protection, and ran the entire project with a dedicated staging footprint in the street itself. That single decision turned what would have been a constant, low-grade safety and logistics problem into a controlled work zone for the duration of the install.

No Roof Loading — Telehandler + Daily Material Truck

On most multi-family re-roofs we roof-load the shingles — meaning a boom truck stages the full material delivery on the roof in bundles ahead of the crew, so nothing has to be hand-carried up ladders during install. Roof loading requires clearance around the building and a staging window where the boom can pivot. On this LoHi site, neither was available.

Instead, we lifted material with a JCB telehandler from the closed street, up to the roof, one pallet at a time. Rather than staging a single large delivery, we had fresh material trucked in every day — matched to the day's install pace, swapped out of the street-closure staging footprint, and moved directly to the roof without sitting on site overnight. It meant tighter coordination with the supplier, more trips, and more logistics touches, but it kept the street closure footprint manageable and let us hit install pace on a 750-square job in a metro urban zone.

Shingle Spec: OC Duration in Teak

The architectural review on the property settled on Owens Corning TruDefinition Duration in the Teak color — a warm brown-and-amber blend that fits the tan and olive exteriors of the buildings and reads as dimensional shadow rather than flat color. Duration's SureNail reinforced nailing strip earns its keep on a 13-building multi-family project: nailing pattern is forgiving at pace across multiple crews, and the wind warranty at proper install is 130 mph — the kind of number you want on record for a property management company that will own this roof for the next 25 years.

Permitting a City Street Closure

A right-of-way street closure in Denver isn't a phone call. It's a Right-of-Way Use Permit through Denver's Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI), with submission requirements that include a traffic-control plan, pedestrian-protection plan, dates and times of closure, posted advance-notice signage, neighborhood notification, and sometimes coordination with RTD if a bus route is affected.

For this project we pulled the permit, posted the closure signs in the legally-required window before mobilization, and coordinated the pedestrian-protection setup with DOTI so foot traffic on the adjacent block was never funneled through the staging footprint. Trash and recycling pickup schedules for the affected residents were confirmed and adjusted where the pickup truck couldn't reach the curb. Emergency-vehicle access was maintained on the closure side via a marked turnaround at the staging boundary.

The permitting process itself took several weeks of lead time before mobilization. That's why on urban-infill projects we start the permit workflow the same week we sign the contract — not the week we plan to mobilize. Owners and HOA boards working with contractors who don't have in-house right-of-way permitting experience often get a 4–6 week start delay they didn't expect.

Why Telehandler-Fed Beats Roof-Loaded in Dense Urban Infill

On a typical residential or suburban multi-family project we roof-load the shingles — meaning a boom truck stages the entire material delivery on the roof in stacks, ahead of the install crew, so nothing has to be hand-carried up ladders during the actual install window. It's the fastest, cleanest way to feed an install crew on most jobs.

Roof-loading needs three things this LoHi site couldn't give us: a setback from the building wide enough for the boom truck to extend fully, an elevation low enough that the boom can clear the eave with margin, and a staging window long enough for the truck to land all the bundles before the day's install pace catches up. On three- and four-story urban-infill multi-family with shared walls and sub-eight-foot setbacks, none of those conditions are usually present.

A telehandler — in our case the JCB — works in a much tighter footprint, lifts at variable angles, and can stage one pallet at a time at controllable speed. The trade-off is total throughput: telehandler lifts are slower than a boom-truck dump. The way we close that gap is daily-cadence material delivery, matched to the day's install pace, with fresh material trucked in every morning rather than staged on site for the full project.

What Two Weeks for Thirteen Buildings Actually Looks Like

Thirteen buildings in two weeks is aggressive. The way it lands inside that window is by running a rolling start sequence rather than a one-building-at-a-time pass. By the time crew A is closing out the first building, crew B is mid-install on the second, and a tear-off team is opening the third. Every morning has all three workstreams active, with the foreman moving between them and the project manager confirming the day's material delivery against the day's install pace.

On a project with a finite street-closure permit window, this rolling sequence is what keeps the closure days at minimum. Stretching the same scope sequentially — one building, then the next — would have meant six to seven weeks of street closure instead of two, and a much higher price tag for the property owner just on the permit-and-traffic-control line item.

Two Weeks, Hail Claim, Documented Closeout

From mobilization through cleanup, the project ran two weeks. The carrier's hail claim covered the scope; we documented each building individually, coordinated supplements for code-upgrade work where the decking or ice-and-water needed attention, and delivered a per-building warranty packet at closeout. Street closure came down the same day the final building closed out.