Commercial General Contractor in Decatur, GA.

Decatur is small in square miles but dense in the kind of building stock that generates real GC work: the downtown square around the old DeKalb County Courthouse, the restaurant and retail strip along E Ponce de Leon Ave and Church St, and the office and mixed-use buildings that have gone in around the Decatur MARTA station as the city has pushed transit-oriented redevelopment. We also cover the corridors just outside the square — Scott Blvd near Suburban Plaza, Clairmont Rd near Emory Decatur Hospital and the Atlanta VA Medical Center, and North Decatur Rd toward Emory and the CDC campus.

South and east of downtown, Oakhurst and the commercial nodes near E Lake have their own mix of small retail buildings, churches, and older multifamily properties, and we take on work there too. Whether the address falls inside the city limits or in the unincorporated DeKalb County pockets that border them changes which permitting desk we're dealing with, and we handle both.

A lot of the storefront buildings on Church St and E Ponce de Leon are pre-1950s brick construction, which means restaurant and retail buildouts there usually involve more than new paint and fixtures — outdated mechanical and electrical behind the facade, ADA-compliant restrooms, and kitchen buildouts that have to be run past the fire marshal before a tenant can open. We do that work as the GC, managing the trades on the job the way we do on any commercial interior.

On the roofing side, most of the retail, office, and mixed-use buildings in and around downtown Decatur and Suburban Plaza carry flat or low-slope roofs, which is single-ply TPO territory — the trade we self-perform rather than sub out. We also see steady demand for office and medical tenant improvement work near the Emory Decatur Hospital and VA Medical Center corridor, and roof and exterior repair on the multifamily properties scattered through Oakhurst and the neighborhoods around the square.

Integrity CRR self-performs roofing and prepares roofing estimates in-house. For non-roof scopes, Integrity acts as the general contractor and manages vetted subcontractors.

Permitting depends on the city limit, not the postal city. The City of Decatur says thousands of properties with Decatur mailing addresses are actually in unincorporated DeKalb County. Work inside City of Decatur limits goes through Design, Environment and Construction, whose current instructions require a permit for any roofing or structural work; unincorporated properties use DeKalb County Planning and Sustainability. For a property in a local historic district or designated landmark, we confirm with the City whether a Certificate of Appropriateness or Certificate of Exemption applies rather than inferring historic status from proximity to the square.

Decatur's tree canopy is part of what makes the city look the way it does, and it's also a real driver of roof damage — mature oaks over the older neighborhoods and the downtown blocks mean limb strikes and wind-thrown debris show up on claims as often as straight hail damage from the thunderstorm lines that cross DeKalb County most springs and summers. Either way, the roof still has to be inspected and the damage documented before the carrier can evaluate coverage and the repair scope.

Our in-house estimating team writes roofing repair scopes in Xactimate, a widely used property-loss estimating platform. When the carrier uses the same platform, corresponding line items can be compared directly; otherwise, the construction operations and supporting documentation can still be reviewed without assuming identical formats. After the carrier's initial decision, our team can document differences between the contractor scope and carrier estimate, including applicable code items or concealed conditions found during authorized work, and submit a contractor supplement request for carrier review when appropriate.