Half Of Burbank Is A Cape Cod, And We Know What That Roof Hides

The Cape Cod Problem Nobody Tells You About

A Burbank Cape Cod has a steep front slope, a finished or half-finished upstairs, and knee walls tucked in behind the plaster. It is a smart way to get two bedrooms out of a small footprint, and it is a rough way to vent a roof. The upstairs eats the air space that a normal attic uses to breathe, so hot air stalls under the deck in July and warm air melts snow off the middle of the roof in January. The melt runs down to the cold overhang, refreezes, and builds the ice dam that shows up as a brown ring on the bedroom ceiling every February.

That is why we start every Burbank inspection in the attic space rather than on the shingles. We look for soffit vents that somebody stuffed with insulation, ridge vents that were never cut through the sheathing, and bath fans dumping straight into the crawl space behind the knee wall. Fix the air first and the roof above it lasts the way the shingle warranty promises. Skip it and you buy a new roof that fails the same way the old one did, just slower.

The dormers are the other Burbank signature. Half the homes here grew a shed or gable dormer at some point, sometimes with a permit and sometimes with a brother-in-law. Where a dormer wall lands on the main slope you get a sidewall flashing detail that has to be woven shingle by shingle, and that detail is the single most common leak we chase in this town. When we do a shingle roof replacement here, the dormer flashing gets replaced in metal, not caulked and hoped over.

Narrow Lots Change How We Work

Burbank lots are tight, often twenty-five or thirty feet wide with a driveway shared or barely there. That matters more than people expect. A tear-off crew needs a place to put a dumpster, a place to stage bundles, and a way to protect the neighbor’s siding six feet away. We walk the lot before the job and tell you exactly where the truck sits and how long the driveway is blocked. Landscaping gets tarped, the gangway gets swept twice, and we run a magnet over the parkway and the neighbor’s grass before anybody leaves. Nobody in Burbank should be picking nails out of a tire because of our job.

What Gets Called In Most Around Here

• Shingle roof replacement with tear-off to the deck, plus new ventilation sized for a story-and-a-half house.
• Shingle roof repair at dormer sidewalls, valleys and the spots where a previous roofer relied on sealant.
• Gutter replacement and gutter repair on the short overhangs Capes are built with, where ice load bends hangers year after year.
• Storm damage repair after the straight-line wind events that run this stretch of southwest Cook every summer.
• Flat roof repair on rear additions, porch roofs and detached garages that were framed low-slope to keep under the setback.

Ice, Wind And The Burbank Calendar

Our phone tells the season here. January and February bring the ice dam calls, and those get diagnosed honestly: sometimes it is a heat and venting problem, sometimes the ice and water shield at the eave was never installed, sometimes both. Spring brings the wind. Burbank sits in open flat country with nothing upwind to slow a gust, and a fifty-mile-an-hour push will lift tabs off a south or west slope while leaving the rest of the roof untouched. Summer brings hail some years and nothing at all in others, and fall brings the honest homeowners who want the roof looked at before the cold arrives. That last group is our favorite kind of call, because a repair in October costs a fraction of an emergency in January.

If your roof took a beating and you are wondering whether it is worth an insurance claim, we photograph it the way an adjuster reads it and give you a straight answer either way. The full process is on the roof insurance claims page. We will tell you when the damage does not clear a deductible, because a denied claim on your record helps nobody.

Owner-Supervised, Ten Minutes Out

Angelo Ristich learned this trade from his father Frank and still climbs the ladder on the jobs his crews run. That is the reason a Burbank homeowner talks to the owner rather than a salesman with a tablet. We can quote most roofs off satellite measurements while you are on the phone, so you get a real number the same day instead of waiting a week for a packet. If financing makes the job possible, we help you get pre-approved before the crew is scheduled.

We are A+ rated with the BBB, hold a HomeAdvisor Elite Service award, and stay licensed and insured in Illinois. Recent work is in the gallery, photographed the day it finished. If you would rather write than call, the contact page reaches us and we answer the same business day.