Roofing in Chicago and the South Suburbs
We take the old roof off, look at what is underneath, and build it back properly. Shingle roofs, flat roofs and commercial roofs — the same six-man crew that has been doing this since 1981.
A tear-off, done the way it should be
A roof replacement we finished in Harvey is a fair example of how these go. We stripped the old shingles off completely, and once the deck was exposed it was clear the plywood had taken on water and was no longer holding a nail. So the decking came off too and went back down as new plywood. Underlayment over that, then the shingles.
That middle step is the one that gets skipped. Layering new shingles over old ones, or nailing into a deck that has gone soft, produces a roof that looks finished and fails early. If we quote you a tear-off and the deck turns out to be sound, that is good news and the decking line comes off your price — but we are going to look before we shingle.
What a shingle roof replacement includes
- Complete strip of the existing roofing down to the deck
- Inspection of the decking, and replacement of any plywood that will not hold
- Underlayment across the full deck
- New asphalt shingles, with flashing at valleys, walls and penetrations
- Cleanup of the property — nails included
Flat roofs
Flat roofs fail differently to pitched roofs. Water does not run off a flat roof, it sits and finds the seam, and by the time it shows on a ceiling it has usually been travelling sideways for a while. Chicago's freeze-and-thaw cycle is hard on flat roof seams in particular — water works into a seam in November and spends the winter opening it.
We work on flat roofs on houses, on the back-of-building porches that are everywhere on the South Side, and on commercial buildings. If your building is commercial, the commercial page covers how those jobs are scheduled.
Roof and wall usually fail together
We are a masonry company as much as a roofing company, which changes what we notice. Water coming into an upstairs room is often not the roof field at all — it is the parapet wall above the roofline, or a chimney whose crown has cracked and is letting water run down inside the stack.
A roofing-only crew replaces the roof and the stain comes back the following spring. We would rather tell you the roof is fine and the problem is thirty feet of mortar.
Getting a price
Estimates are free and we will give you the honest range of what the roof needs — a repair where a repair will hold, a replacement where it will not. We have worked on everything from a single porch roof to full commercial buildings, and we would rather fit the job to your budget than talk you into the biggest version of it.
Flat roof work
A flat roof and the wall standing on top of it are one job, not two. On this one we dealt with the parapet and its coping at the same time as the roof — which is the only way the ceiling stain below actually stops coming back.
