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Construction Marketplace 4 7 Wednesday, January 11, 2017 PEEL & SEAL VERSATILE ROOFING MEMBRANE BY MFM BUILDING PRODUCTS Manufactured in the U.S.A. by MFM Building Products, Peel & Seal ® is the original, self-stick roll roofing specifical- ly designed for low slope residential and commercial applications. Composed of an exclusive formula, Peel & Seal pro- vides a long-lasting, durable, mainte- nance-free roofing surface. Product can be left exposed to the elements indefi- nitely. Peel & Seal is composed of a lami- nate of aluminum foil, high-density poly- mer films and a layer of rubberized asphalt mastic. The product creates a per- manently bonded, weatherproof system. This high-strength product features an aluminum top surface that limits solar heat gain to keep internal temperatures cooler for increased energy efficiency in the building structure. Peel & Seal product features: flexi- ble, self-sealing and energy efficient; sin- gle-ply, one-step installation direct to the roof deck; requires no coatings or cover- ings for permanent exposure to sunlight; effective barrier to the elements; cross- laminated, durable construction; virtually maintenance-free; with multiple width choices and four color options. Peel & Seal is also an ideal solu- tion as a flashing membrane around exterior penetrations such as chimneys, vents, ducts, irregular features or any hard to waterproof area. Specialized applications include dormers, sunrooms, open porches, storage and agricultural buildings, and mobile home roofs. Peel & Seal can even be used on EPDM roofing systems when utilizing an MFM-approved EPDM primer. These primers allow Peel & Seal to aggressive- ly adhere to the EPDM surface for appli- cations such as mobile homes, RVs, campers and other EPDM roofing sys- tems. Product Approvals Peel & Seal is tested to ASTM D 1970, meets the requirements of ICC-ES AC75 Report ICC-ES ESR-1654, Florida Building Code 11842.2/13025.1/13025.2, Miami-Dade County Product Control Approved, Texas Department of Insurance Accepted RC38, and UL ® Classified Prepared Roofing Accessory. Peel & Seal Guide Specifications and Information Peel & Seal 3-Part Guide Specifications, Technical Data and Installation Instructions are posted at www.mfmbp.com. Visit booth #W7083 for free samples. For more information, go to www .mfmbp.com, call 740.622.2645 or email info@mfmbp.com. ROOFTOP HOT: GROWING AN URBAN FARMSTAND IN BALTIMORE By Lorrie Baumann Farming wasn't the first choice of career for Brett Sippel and Sabrina Mincey. Still less, storekeeping. Nevertheless, today they're growing food in Baltimore and selling it in their 600 square foot neigh- borhood store in Highlandtown, Maryland, an arts district within Baltimore City. The RoofTop HoT store's a bit like an urban farmstand, selling the kinds of things you'd expect to see at a farmer's market in an area of the country that has the climate for farming. Sippel and Mincey grow a lot of the produce they carry on their home's rooftop and on a three-acre farm not far away. They source meats and dairy products from other Maryland and Pennsylvania organic farmers, and Chef Dan Ennis provides a small selection of prepared items and meal kits as well as the jams and sauces he makes in a nearby commercial kitchen. There are no other employees. "It's important to us to manage the overhead so we can compete in this vast- ly growing market," Sippel said. "Most of our days start at 4 a.m. Most of our nights end at about midnight or 1 a.m. When we sleep, we sleep hard." They've been doing the farming full time for the past six years, and they view the coaching they offer to others who'd like to learn to garden sustainably in the city as part of that business too. "We use vacant lots. You can't really use the soil in these post-industrial cities; it's been contaminated, so we garden in contain- ers. We also have a farm outside the city where we grow all the tomatoes and gar- lic and things like that. Eventually, we'd like to turn that into a mushroom farm," Sippel said. "It's just, you know, time." It all started with a garden on the roof of the couple's Baltimore row house. In those days, Sippel was working in sales for a company in the action sports industry, and Mincey was a project man- ager for a real estate company. She'd grown up gardening in Georgia, though, so it was natural for her to suggest that one answer to Sippel's food allergies might be for them to grow their own veg- etables without chemicals. The space they had available to them was the flat roof atop their home. Local zoning regulations require that Baltimore roofs are able to bear about 70 to 90 pounds per square foot, so their roof has no problem bearing the 25 pounds per 1.5 square feet that their growing medium weighs when it's saturated. They had the roof tested, though, before they started hauling their growing medium up there, just to be sure. "It was a newer build that the time that I was a part of, so I knew what it was," Sippel said. "The next thing we knew, we were growing way more than we could eat ourselves." First he did what gardeners do – he started handing out fresh tomatoes and zucchini to his friends. That turned into a table, a scale and a cash box in front of the house. "It was more or less like a five-year-old's lemonade stand. If I was- n't out there, people might leave cash," he said. "It was pretty laid back, let's say." As the garden grew, Sippel and Mincey started a farmers market in Rockville, Maryland. Friends in the neighborhood started asking them, since they'd be going to the farmers market anyway, if they'd maybe bring back some vegetables for them, and maybe they could stop at the market's cheese stand while they were at it. Sippel and Mincey started a newsletter to let all those folks know what the farmers mar- ket would be offering that week. "It's been six years of us starting to do this home delivery service," Sippel says. Eventually, they figured out that opening a store could save them some of that hauling food back and forth. They found a storefront location that's just about four blocks away from their home and held a very long soft opening in the summer of 2013. Today, they draw about 500 customers a month. Ironically, some of their customers are employees at the Amazon fulfillment center that's just about a mile away. That makes Amazon a direct competitor too. "There's no way we could carry any of those products with bar codes on them because you could get them cheaper from Amazon and have it at your door in, lit- erally, two hours," Sippel says. "We can't hate that because they employ 3,000 peo- ple in our neighborhood." "Our community is just growing and growing. We really don't know what the next day's going to bring," Sippel says. "You just open these doors, and you never know who's going to come in." "The whole goal for us: there's a lot of turmoil going on in the world. Having a moment where we can get away from that and come together as a community and be people supporting each other and trying to do good things," he adds. "Our customers tell us what they want, and we listen to them, and that's how we know how to grow." cracked landscape from a drought-ridden desert. It's hard to believe that the plan is to leave this subfloor in place, renovating it rather than demolishing and removing it. That disbelief is magnified when I walk across the floor and can hear a cracking and popping sound coming from each footstep. I'm told that the subfloor is made of ordinary gypsum material, which is extremely common in multifam- ily housing like the one we are visiting today. My quick tutorial on the downside of ordinary gypsum subfloors is interrupt- ed by the sound of a high-pitched com- mercial drill in the next room. Making my way toward the sound of the drill, I see Kris Day, Regional Business Manager with HPS Schönox. He's not standing to the side in dress khakis and a corporate-logo pullover. Instead, he is wearing commercial overalls with rein- forced knees and he is the one running the drill inside of a deep blue barrel with Schönox written on its side. Two flooring contractors are with him and they listen closely as he gives them some advice on how best to distribute and spread the con- tents of the barrel. It's Schönox APF, syn- thetic gypsum fiber reinforced leveling compound, and it's just what this subfloor needs to be reconditioned and readied for a new floor covering. Kris notices me in the entryway and comes over to quickly explain what is happening. "The subfloor throughout this entire apartment complex was covered with an ordinary gypsum product that levels the subfloor and provides sound proofing, but unfortunately it also deteri- orates and cracks over time," he explains. "The expense to demolish the subfloor and remove it would be costly to the owner of the complex, not to mention the environmental impact of filling landfills Schönox (Cont'd. from p. 1) with the material." Kris walks me through the process where the existing subfloor is vacuumed, primed and then leveled. The Schönox APF has embedded fibers that remain suspended as the product dries forming a smooth, strong subfloor with a compres- sive strength of 6200 psi. Kris explains that the combination of the fiber rein- forcement and the strength of the APF will form an outstanding subfloor that will not suffer the same deteriorated result as the original ordinary gypsum subfloor. As I take a step back to let the floor- ing contractors work, I'm impressed by the speed of what they are doing and how the rough, frankly sad, looking subfloor is covered and reinforced by the Schönox APF product. Kris shows me an apart- ment next door where the floor leveling work was completed the previous day. We walk across a smooth, strong sub- floor that shows no signs of what I saw just earlier in the other apartment. I ask Kris if his hands-on approach has anything to do with my photographer and me visiting the site today. He laughs and indicates just the opposite. "At Schönox we all wear two distinct hats providing the sales side with project and product planning as well as the technical side where we help flooring profession- als to learn everything they need to know to use the Schönox products to their max- imum benefit," Kris explains. "It's actu- ally a great linkage of the two halves of our work that helps me to know exactly what I am selling and supporting in the field." Kris shakes my hand and it's not long before I hear the drill running again and I see contractors covering the sub- floor and giving it a new life for the next apartment dweller. Visit Schönox at booth #S3016.