Eight Decades Of Roofs Inside One Village

Reading A Downers Grove Roof Before We Price It

The first thing we do on a Downers Grove call is figure out what era we are standing on. The village grew around the railroad, and some of the oldest houses near the downtown station were ordered out of a catalog and shipped here in numbered pieces. Those kit houses have real dimensional lumber, board decking with gaps between the boards, and rafters spaced the way carpenters felt like spacing them that week. A tear-off on one of those is a different job than a tear-off on a 1990s subdivision house with plywood sheathing and truss framing, and the price sheet has to say so before we start, not after.

The middle-era stock brings its own list. The ranches and split-levels that filled in south and west of Ogden Avenue after the war usually carry low-slope sections over an attached garage or a bumped-out family room, tied into a shingle field at a flashing joint that has been caulked by three different owners. Newer construction is easier on framing but harder on ventilation, because a lot of it was built with soffit vents that somebody later stuffed full of insulation. We look at intake and exhaust on every house here, since a roof that cannot breathe cooks its own shingles from underneath and fails a decade early no matter whose name is on the wrapper.

Trees are the other Downers Grove variable. The older neighborhoods have canopy that touches the roof on three sides, which means shade, moss on north slopes, constant needle and leaf load in the valleys, and limbs riding the shingles every time the wind comes up. We note the branches that need trimming before we set foot on the roof, because dropping a limb on brand new shingles two months after a replacement is a phone call nobody enjoys.

What Downers Grove Calls Us For

• Shingle roof replacement across every era in town, with the deck condition priced honestly before the tear-off starts.
• Shingle roof repair when a slope has good life left and only wind or a limb took tabs off it.
• Flat roof repair on garage and family-room additions, plus full flat roof replacement where the old modified bitumen has given up.
• Storm damage repair and insurance claim help, documented the way an adjuster wants to see it.
• Gutter replacement sized for the leaf load those old trees drop every October.

Downtown and along Ogden Avenue we also handle the low-slope commercial roofs over storefronts, offices and restaurants. Those get scheduled around business hours, and the property manager gets photos they can forward without a translator. See commercial roofing for how that works.

Kit Houses And Old Decking, Straight Talk

If your house came out of a catalog, the roof deck is probably one-by boards laid with spacing. That is not a defect, it is how it was built, and plenty of those decks are still sound after a hundred years. What it means practically is two things. First, some shingle warranties want continuous sheathing, so we will tell you up front whether we are overlaying the boards with new decking or nailing to what is there. Second, the fastener pattern changes, and a crew that does not slow down for it ends up with nails in the gaps and shingles that lift in the first real gust.

We would rather explain that on the front end than discover it at nine in the morning with the old roof already in the dumpster. When we walk a house like this the price we hand you already covers the decking scenario we found, and if the number moves during the job it moves because of something we photographed and showed you first.

Storms, Ice And The Ogden Avenue Corridor

DuPage takes the same storm tracks Cook does, just a bit later in the afternoon. Hail moves through in spring and early summer, straight-line winds strip ridge caps and vent boots, and every winter the freeze-thaw cycle builds ice at the eaves of any house with warm attic air escaping into a cold roof. The mature-tree neighborhoods here get an extra dose of it, because shaded north slopes hold snow and ice long after the sunny side has cleared.

Our advice for Downers Grove is simple. Get the roof looked at within two weeks of any hail or hard wind, keep the photos even if you never file, and never sign anything with a crew that showed up unannounced with plates from another state. We inspect at no charge, we tell you when the damage does not justify a claim, and we hand you documentation instead of pressure. Hail damage repair and wind damage repair both start with the same free look.

Who Shows Up

Guardian Roofing Systems is second generation. Angelo Ristich learned this trade from his father Frank and is on the job in person, so the man who priced your roof is the man watching it get installed. We are A+ with the BBB, hold a HomeAdvisor Elite Service award, and stay licensed and insured in Illinois. Phone pricing runs off satellite measurements, so most Downers Grove homeowners get a real number on the first call, and we help with financing pre-approval when a replacement lands at a bad time of year. Recent work is in the gallery, and if you want to drive past a finished job nearby, ask and we will give you an address.