Flat Roofs Are The City’s Roof, And They Are Our Trade

The Chicago Roof, Building Type By Building Type

The two-flat and three-flat, stacked from Pilsen to Logan Square to Bronzeville, carry a flat deck with a parapet on three sides and a wood back porch off the rear. Water on those roofs does not run off an edge, it runs to a drain or a scupper, and when that path plugs with maple seeds or ice, the roof turns into a pond that finds the weakest lap seam. The courtyard buildings on the North and Northwest Sides multiply the problem across four or five roof planes with valleys, mechanical curbs and shared parapets between owners.

Then there is the bungalow belt, the ring of brick 1920s bungalows through Portage Park, Garfield Ridge, Chatham, Beverly and Ashburn. Those are pitched roofs with a low-slope section over the rear kitchen addition or the dormer shed, so a single house needs two different roofing systems that have to marry at a flashing. Half the leaks we chase in bungalows live exactly at that transition.

Greystones and old frame workers cottages add masonry and settling to the mix. Chicago clay soil moves, buildings rack a little over a century, and the parapet coping opens up joints that let water down inside the wall cavity. When a tenant reports a stain on a third-floor ceiling, the leak is often three feet of wall away from where the water shows up. We chase it with a hose test rather than guessing.

What We Do Most Inside The City

• Flat roof repair on two-flats, three-flats and courtyard buildings, from a single blistered seam to a full section of ponding deck.
• TPO roof installation and TPO replacement where an owner wants a white membrane that reflects the July sun off a top-floor unit.
• Flat roof replacement with modified bitumen or EPDM when the building calls for a torch-down or rubber system instead of a single-ply.
• Multi-family roofing for owners, landlords and small management companies with tenants living under the work.
• Commercial flat roofs on the storefronts, corner taverns and light industrial buildings that share the block with the flats.
• Gutter repair and downspout work where a bungalow’s system was built for 1925 rainfall and now overflows every storm.

Porch roofs deserve their own line. A Chicago back porch takes weather from every direction, the roof over the top deck is usually the oldest surface on the building, and the city has strong opinions about porches after 2003. When we rebuild a porch roof we look at what it is landing on before we cover it up, which sometimes means telling an owner the carpentry comes before the roofing.

Permits, Parapets And Working In A City

Roofing inside city limits carries paperwork the suburbs do not. Chicago requires a permit for a tear-off and replacement, contractors have to be licensed and bonded with the city, and inspectors do come look. We handle the filing rather than handing an owner a folder, and we plan the job around the reality of the block: where the dumpster can legally sit, whether the alley gives us a shot at the roof, whether we need to protect a neighbor’s car.

Parapet walls are the other city-specific piece. A parapet gets weather on both faces and on top. Coping stones or metal caps have to shed water outward, the counterflashing has to be cut into a mortar joint rather than smeared with caulk, and the membrane has to run up and over the top or terminate in a bar that holds. Most of the chronic leaks we inherit in the city are parapet leaks that three previous contractors treated with a bucket of black plastic cement. That works for one winter. It is not a repair.

The Friday Night In A Three-Flat

One of our reviews comes from Jimmy Proctor. He called on a Friday night with a leak coming into a Chicago three-flat. It was a blizzard. Our crew came out the next morning, shoveled ice off the roof to get down to a surface worth patching, found the failure, and stopped the water. A leak on a Friday night in a three-flat means three households have water running through their ceilings all weekend, and that is not something you tell a landlord to sit on until Monday.

That is the pattern for storm damage repair in the city. We stabilize first, get the water stopped and the interior protected, then come back in daylight to talk about whether the section needs a repair, a recover or a full replacement. When the failure traces to a storm event, we photograph it the way an adjuster wants and walk owners through roof insurance claims.

Winter Is The Real Test

Lake effect snow sits on a flat roof and does not slide off. It melts from the bottom where the building’s heat escapes, runs to a cold spot at the parapet or the drain, and freezes there. The ice grows, the drain plugs, and now there is standing water backing up under laps that were never designed to be submerged.

Our winter advice for city buildings is short. Keep drains and scuppers clear in the fall before the leaves come down, get a look at the roof after the first hard freeze rather than after the first ceiling stain, and put insulation and ventilation on the list, because a warm roof deck makes its own ice.

Who Shows Up

Guardian Roofing Systems is second generation. Angelo Ristich learned the trade from his father Frank, took the company over in 2013 and modernized how it runs, and he is on the jobs himself. When an owner in the city calls, the person quoting the roof is the person who will be standing on it. We pull satellite measurements while you are on the phone, and we help owners work out financing when a building needs more roof than the month’s rent roll covers.

We are A+ with the BBB, hold a HomeAdvisor Elite Service award, and stay licensed and insured in Illinois. The gallery has city work in it: torch-down sections, white membrane on a top floor, balcony decks, tear-offs down to good decking. If you want a reference on a building near yours, ask.