Cottage-Era Houses And The Roofs They Grew

What A Hundred Years Of Additions Leaves Behind

The oldest part of Lake Bluff went up as a summer place, and a lot of those houses are still standing on the streets around the green. Start with a modest frame cottage, add a dormer in the twenties, close in a porch in the fifties, put a family room off the back in the seventies, and finish a second floor sometime after that. Every one of those moves created a place where a new roof plane meets an old one, and every one of those junctions is a leak waiting for its turn.

That is where we spend our time on a Lake Bluff roof. Not the open field of shingles, which any crew can cover, but the tie-ins: where an addition roof dies into a wall and needs proper step flashing behind the siding rather than a bead of sealant across the front, where a dormer cheek meets the main slope, where an old porch roof pitches at almost nothing and drains onto the roof below it. Get those right and the roof lasts its full life. Get them wrong and you get a stain on a bedroom ceiling three winters later with a roof that looks brand new from the street.

Newer Streets, Different Problems

West of the old village the houses get newer, out past the green toward Rockland Road and the subdivisions built through the second half of the last century. Those roofs are simpler and their failures are more predictable: builder-grade shingles reaching the end of a normal life, ventilation that was minimal when the house was framed, and gutters undersized for the roof they hang on. Straightforward work, and we quote it as such rather than dressing it up.

The Work We Do Most In Lake Bluff

• Shingle roof replacement with full tear-off, so every one of those old tie-ins gets flashed properly instead of covered again.
• Shingle roof repair on dormers, porch roofs and the slopes wind gets under first.
• Gutter replacement and installation sized for the roof area and the ice load, not for what happened to be there before.
• Flat roof repair on the low-slope additions, porch roofs and garage roofs these houses collected over the decades.
• Wind damage repair after the lake gets under a rake edge, with insurance claim documentation when the damage warrants it.

A Mile From The Water, Which Changes Everything

Being this close to the lake means the snow arrives heavier and stays longer than it does out west in the county. A north-facing slope in Lake Bluff can hold pack from December into March. Heat escaping the attic melts the underside, the meltwater runs to the eave where there is cold air under the overhang, and it refreezes into a dam. Once the dam is there, water backs up under shingles that only ever shed water downhill, and the ceiling below gets wet while the roof looks perfect.

On old cottages this is worse than average, because the attics were never built to breathe. Low kneewall spaces, insulation stuffed into the soffit blocking whatever intake existed, and a ridge with no vent at all. When we replace a roof here we run ice and water shield well past the code minimum at eaves and valleys, open up real intake at the soffit, and put a continuous vent on the ridge so the deck stays cold. Then we make sure the gutters actually carry the water away, because a packed gutter in November is a block of ice in January.

Old Cedar And What Replaces It

A good number of the cottage-era houses around the green started life under cedar shake, and some of them are still wearing it or wearing the second generation of it. Cedar in this climate has a hard run: the north slopes stay wet, moss takes hold, the butts cup and split, and eventually the fasteners let go. When a cedar roof reaches that point the owner has a decision to make, and it deserves an honest conversation rather than a sales pitch. Real cedar again is a legitimate answer if you want the house to look the way it was built and you accept the maintenance that comes with it. A heavy shake-profile architectural shingle is the answer most people here land on, and on a steep cottage slope viewed from the street it holds up well.

What matters more than the product is what happens underneath. Cedar was often laid over spaced sheathing, strips of board with gaps between them so the shake could breathe, and asphalt cannot go over that. It needs a solid deck, which means sheeting the whole roof over before anything else happens. That is real material and real labor, and it belongs in the number from the start, not discovered on day two. We tell you that during the walk so the price you hear is the price you pay.

Wind Off The Bluff Finds The Rake First

Exposed rake edges on these older houses take the brunt of a lake wind, and a rake without a proper starter course along it is an invitation. Wind gets under the first shingle, lifts a course, and works down the slope from there. We run starter along both eaves and rakes as standard, which is not universal practice and costs very little compared to the repair it prevents.

The Honest Version Of Our Schedule

Our shop is in Alsip on the south side of the metro, so a Lake Bluff address is a long drive for us and we will say that on the phone rather than pretend we are five minutes out. North county jobs go on scheduled run days with several addresses grouped together, which is why the drive never shows up as a charge on your invoice. Leaks that are actively wetting a ceiling jump the schedule. We tarp and patch first, then sort out the real repair.

Angelo Ristich learned this trade under his father Frank and runs the company now with the same habit of being on the roof rather than behind a desk. Straightforward roofs get a real number off satellite measurements while you are on the phone. Cut-up cottage roofs get walked first, because a photo from space does not show a porch tie-in. We help with financing pre-approval when a roof shows up ahead of the budget, we are BBB A+ with a HomeAdvisor Elite Service award, licensed and insured in Illinois, and the recent work is in the gallery.