St. Augustineroofing and exterior work
St. Augustine has the oldest housing in St. Johns County, its own building department, and a coastline that is not what people assume. All three change how a roof here gets planned, permitted and installed.
The oldest stockin St. Johns County
The median home inside the City of St. Augustine was built in 1980: older than Jacksonville’s median, older than the St. Johns County median of 2004, and the oldest of anywhere we work in this county. That is before you get to the historic district, where the buildings are older again.
Be careful with the ZIP-code figure if you go looking: 32084 shows a median of 1998, because the ZIP sweeps in newer development well outside the city limits. It describes the postal area, not the city.
Old stock means the work rarely stops at the shingles. Decking, fascia, soffit and flashing details on a house of this vintage have usually been reworked more than once and not always well. Because we hold a Certified Building Contractor licence alongside our roofing licence, what we find underneath does not become somebody else’s job.
Not an oceanfront citywhatever you have read
St. Augustine fronts Matanzas Bay and the Intracoastal Waterway. Anastasia Island sits between the city and the Atlantic, and the city’s own adopted Comprehensive Plan says the only beaches and dunes inside its limits are in the Anastasia State Recreation Area, which it does not regulate. St. Augustine Beach, out on the island, is a separate city with its own building department.
That distinction is not pedantry. It decides who reviews your permit, and it decides what your roof is actually exposed to. Estuary salt air still corrodes fasteners, flashing and exposed metal here, so material choice matters. It is not the same load as a house taking direct oceanfront wind and spray a mile east.
Tree cover is light here too (25 percent in the state’s 2021 assessment, against 46 to 55 percent in the inland towns) so less limb-fall risk and more sun working on the roof.
The city permitsits own work
Inside the city limits, roofing permits come from the City of St. Augustine’s Planning and Building Department at 75 King Street. Applications go in through the city’s own online portal, and Florida Product Approval Numbers are required for the materials being installed.
Outside the limits it is St. Johns County, and a “St. Augustine, FL” mailing address is more likely to be county-permitted than city-permitted. The county’s own building headquarters is itself a St. Augustine address on unincorporated land. We settle it by parcel, not by envelope.
Neither the city nor the county publishes a fixed design wind speed. Both point to the per-address hazards lookup, and the 130 mph contour runs through this county, so the number that governs your roof is genuinely address-specific here.
What we doin St. Augustine
St. Augustinequestions we get asked
It depends entirely on whether the parcel is inside the city limits, and the mailing address will not tell you. Inside the limits it is the City of St. Augustine's Planning and Building Department at 75 King Street, (904) 825-1065, with every application submitted through the city's online portal and Florida Product Approval Numbers required for the materials. Outside them it is the St. Johns County Building Department, whose own headquarters on Lewis Speedway carries a St. Augustine address and sits on unincorporated land, which tells you how often the address misleads. We check the parcel before we file anything.
No, and the city says so itself. St. Augustine fronts Matanzas Bay and the Intracoastal Waterway, with Anastasia Island sitting between the city and the Atlantic. Its own adopted Comprehensive Plan states that the only beaches and dunes within the city limits are in the Anastasia State Recreation Area, over which the City has no regulatory jurisdiction. Salt exposure is still very real here (it works on fasteners, flashing and any exposed metal) but this is an estuary town, not a beachfront one.
No. St. Augustine Beach is a separate municipality with its own building department, its own limits and its own submission process, and the Census records the two as distinct places. It sits on Anastasia Island, directly oceanfront, and by its own description runs roughly two to three miles north to south and about a mile wide. If your property is there rather than in St. Augustine proper, the permitting path is a different one entirely, which is worth establishing on day one rather than mid-job.
Hurricane Matthew in 2016 is the clearest one: the St. Augustine Pier recorded an 86 mph gust, among the strongest measured anywhere in the region in the last decade, and the storm drove record storm tides along this coast. Hurricane Irma followed in 2017, with a tornado on September 10 that uprooted and snapped trees around the Castillo de San Marcos and the Huguenot Cemetery, and an EF-2 further south at Crescent Beach. Ian, Nicole and Milton all brought federal assistance to St. Johns County, but those were surge and flooding events rather than roof events.
It can, and the city is the authority on how. St. Augustine has a large historic district, and inside it exterior materials and finishes may be subject to review, whether that applies to your parcel, and to what extent, is a question for the City's Planning and Building Department rather than for us. We raise that question at the application stage, before anything is ordered, because finding out afterwards is expensive. Florida Product Approval Numbers are required for the materials regardless.
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