Burke Mountain and Westwood Plateau sit high enough that snow load and ice-dam protection matter, so ventilation and ice-and-water membrane along the eaves are worth doing properly. Much of the newer growth is strata townhomes and single-family builds where rainscreen cladding and tidy flashing keep walls dry. Down in Maillardville and Austin Heights, older character homes often need cedar or asphalt work that respects the original rooflines.
Heritage rooflines from Maillardville to Austin Heights
Maillardville began in 1909 when francophone workers were recruited to the Fraser Mills sawmill, and the neighbourhood grew into one of the largest French-Canadian communities west of Manitoba. The small cottages that survive along Brunette Avenue and the streets near Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes were framed for a different era — tight rafters, narrow soffits, and simple steep gables that leave little room for the airflow a modern roof needs. Re-roofing one of these homes usually means retrofitting better attic ventilation alongside new shingles, because a sealed, under-vented attic is what cooks an asphalt roof early and feeds rot at the sheathing.
Austin Heights tells a later story: post-war bungalows from the 1950s and 60s, many carrying low-slope additions tacked on over the decades. Those mixed roof planes are where leaks hide, and a focused repair at a tired flashing or transition often buys years before a full tear-off is warranted.
Hillside builds on Westwood Plateau and Burke Mountain
The Westwood Plateau subdivisions of the 1990s and 2000s brought a wave of large homes with complex rooflines — multiple gables, dormers, and tucked-in valleys that collect needles from the surrounding forest and slow the water down. Burke Mountain is newer still, with Partington Creek, Smiling Creek, and the Foothills climbing past 300 metres, high enough that snow settles and lingers while the flats below get plain rain.
On these exposed, steep-access lots, material choice carries more weight than usual. Standing-seam metal sheds snow and debris cleanly and runs far longer between reroofs — a real advantage when reaching the roof already means scaffolding on a sloped driveway. Where heavy snow builds at the eaves, we handle snow and ice-dam removal and detail the membrane so meltwater can’t back up under the shingles. Long roof runs on these homes move a lot of water in a Coquitlam storm, so right-sized gutters and downspouts, kept clear of plateau forest debris, are part of nearly every job up here.
New walls around Lafarge Lake and Town Centre
The towers and strata townhomes filling in around Lafarge Lake and the Evergreen Line stations are a different kind of work again. The low-rise strata blocks lean on flat and low-slope torch-on roofing, while the wood-frame townhomes going up across City Centre and lower Burke Mountain are built to current rainscreen standards. Getting the rainscreen drainage cavity and flashing right is what keeps these walls dry through a long Coquitlam winter, and fibre-cement siding has become the default cladding here because it shrugs off constant damp far better than the painted wood it replaces.
Whatever corner of Coquitlam you’re in, we’ll walk the property, tell you plainly what we see, and quote only the work that needs doing.