Flat Roofs And Frame Houses On Narrow Lots

Two Kinds Of Buildings, Two Kinds Of Roofs

Roughly speaking, Forest Park splits into two roofing worlds. There are the old frame single-families, many of them pushing a hundred and thirty years old, with steep pitches, balloon framing and additions bolted on over four generations. Then there are the flats and small apartment buildings, brick, usually two or three units, almost all of them carrying a flat or near-flat roof over the top floor. What works on one is wrong on the other, and a lot of the failed work we get called to repair came from a crew treating a flat like a shingle job.

On the frame houses, the surprise is usually the deck. Century-old sheathing is often board rather than plywood, boards shrink and cup, and a hundred years of nails have chewed them up. We will not know how much of it is sound until the old roof is off, so we tell you that up front and price deck replacement per sheet with your approval before it goes down. Nobody likes a change order. Everybody prefers one they knew was possible and agreed to in advance over one that shows up on the final bill.

On the flats, the question is what system belongs up there. A lot of these buildings still have layers of old built-up asphalt with a mineral cap, patched a dozen times, with ponding water sitting in the low spots for days after a rain. Depending on the building we go with a modified bitumen system torched or set in cold adhesive, or a single-ply membrane where the detailing suits it. What we do not do is throw more patch on a roof that is past patching and call it a repair, because on a two-flat that means water in somebody’s ceiling by February.

What Forest Park Buildings Need Most

• Flat roof replacement and flat roof repair on two-flats, three-flats and rear porch roofs, which is the bulk of what this village calls about.
• Shingle roof replacement on old frame houses, with deck replacement priced honestly instead of hidden.
• Multi-family roofing for small apartment buildings where the work has to happen without displacing tenants.
• Gutter repair and gutter replacement on tight lots where roof runoff has nowhere to go but the gangway between you and your neighbor.
• Commercial roof leak tracing on the storefronts and mixed-use buildings where an apartment sits over a business.

Madison Street is its own category. The storefronts, restaurants and bars along that strip are mostly flat-roofed buildings with rooftop equipment, grease exhaust and decades of penetrations cut through the membrane. See commercial roofing and restaurant roof repair for how we work on a building that cannot close for three days.

Working On A Lot With No Room

Access is the real difference between a Forest Park job and a job out west. There is often no driveway. The gangway is four feet wide. The dumpster has to sit on the street with a permit, or in the alley if the alley will take it, and the tear-off debris has to travel through a space where a wheelbarrow does not fit. That is a planning problem, and we solve it before the crew arrives rather than improvising on the morning of.

It also means being careful with what is around you. Your neighbor’s roof is close enough to walk to. Their car is parked six feet from where the shingles are coming down. We tarp what needs tarping, we keep the alley passable, and we magnet-sweep the gangway and the street at the end of every day. On a block where the houses are this close together, a sloppy crew makes trouble for the homeowner long after the job is done, and we would rather be the outfit people on the block recommend than the one they complain about.

Porch Roofs, Rear Stairs And The Leak Above The Back Door

Almost every older Forest Park building has a rear porch or back-stair structure with its own small flat roof, and that little roof causes an outsized share of the leaks we chase. It is low-slope, it is often the oldest surface on the building, it collects leaves in the corner where it meets the wall, and it gets walked on. When water shows up above a back door or along the rear wall of a top-floor unit, that porch roof is the first place we look. Rebuilding it properly with a real membrane and correct wall flashing is a small job that prevents a large one.

The Company Sending The Truck

Guardian Roofing Systems is second generation. Angelo Ristich learned the trade from his father Frank, took over the business and modernized how it runs, and he is on jobs himself rather than passing you to a salesman. We do flat roof work constantly, which is exactly what a village like this needs, and we can price off satellite measurements over the phone before anybody schedules a visit.

We hold an A+ BBB rating and a HomeAdvisor Elite Service award, and we are licensed and insured in Illinois. We have been doing this since 2013, including plenty of emergency patches on flat roofs in weather nobody wants to be out in, and the gallery shows finished work photographed the day the crew came off the roof.