Sixty Years Of Roofs In One Village

Reading A Lombard Roof By Its Decade

You can usually tell when a Lombard house was built from the driveway, and the build date tells us most of what to expect before the ladder goes up. The older houses near the village center have steeper pitches, real plank decking with gaps between boards, and masonry chimneys that need counterflashing cut into the mortar rather than surface-caulked. The postwar ranches have shallow pitches, plywood or plank, gable vents and almost no soffit intake. The 1980s subdivisions have cut-up roofs with several valleys and the first generation of ridge vent, some of it now doing nothing.

What that means practically is that a bid built off square footage alone will be wrong on at least two of those three houses. A steep older roof takes longer and takes more safety setup. A shallow ranch roof needs different underlayment logic at the eaves. A cut-up 80s roof carries more valley metal and more flashing than its square count suggests. We measure and quote for the roof you actually own.

The other thing every decade in Lombard shares is layers. Plenty of houses here are wearing their second shingle roof and a few are wearing their third, which Illinois code does not allow and which we will not add to. When we tear off, we go to the deck, and we look at what those old layers were hiding: soft spots around the chimney, split decking at the eave, and rot at the fascia where old gutter has been overflowing quietly for years.

Ventilation Is The Quiet Problem Here

More Lombard roofs die early from heat than from weather. A postwar ranch with gable vents and no soffit intake bakes its attic all summer, and the underside of the shingle cooks. You see it as premature granule loss on the south and west slopes, curling at the tab edges, and a roof that fails at eighteen years when it was sold as a thirty-year product. Homeowners blame the shingle. It was usually the attic.

Fixing it is not exotic. Real intake at the soffit, real exhaust at the ridge, and enough of both that they balance. When we replace a roof here we correct the ventilation while the deck is open, because doing it later means cutting a finished roof. That is baked into how we quote shingle roof replacement in this village, and it is the reason our roofs on these houses tend to outlast the ones that went on before them.

The Work That Fills Our Lombard Schedule

• Shingle roof replacement with full tear-off, plank decking repaired or replaced, and ventilation corrected before the new roof goes down.
• Shingle roof repair on wind-lifted tabs, cracked vent boots, and the valley that keeps staining the same bedroom ceiling.
• Gutter replacement and gutter repair, usually upsized, with downspouts moved away from the foundation.
• Hail damage repair and insurance claim help, documented the way an adjuster needs to see it.
• Flat roof repair on rear additions, enclosed porches and detached garages, plus replacement when patching stops paying.

Storms Come Through This County On Purpose

DuPage takes hail. Storm cells track the I-88 and I-290 corridors across this county several times a season, and Lombard sits right in the path. What we tell homeowners here is to get the roof looked at within two weeks of any hail or high-wind event, even when the ceiling looks fine. Hail bruises the mat without breaking it, granules come off, and the exposed asphalt goes brittle over the winter. The stain shows up in February from a storm that happened in June.

Keep the inspection photos even if you never file. And do not sign anything with a crew that showed up the day after the storm with out-of-state plates before somebody local has been on your roof. We inspect free, tell you honestly whether the damage clears your deductible, and meet the adjuster on the roof when a claim is worth filing. Details are on the storm damage repair page.

Trees, Shade And Water That Does Not Leave

The mature canopy over the older Lombard streets is beautiful and it costs roofs years. Shaded north slopes never dry fully, which is where the black streaking and moss show up first. Limbs over the roof drop debris into valleys and gutters, and gutters that stay packed all fall are gutters that hold ice all winter. Ice at the eave backs water up under the shingle, and that is the leak that appears in a January thaw on a roof that has no other problem.

We run ice and water shield well past the code minimum at the eaves and up every valley on Lombard replacements, and we size gutter for what actually falls here now rather than what the original builder installed. On a lot of these houses the drainage work is the part that fixes the wet basement too. Gutter installation covers how we size it.

Who Shows Up

Guardian Roofing Systems is second generation. Angelo Ristich learned the trade under his father Frank, took the company over and modernized how it runs, and he still supervises jobs in person. BBB A+ rated, HomeAdvisor Elite Service award, licensed and insured in Illinois. We pull satellite measurements while you are on the phone so you get a real number before anybody drives out, and we help with financing pre-approval when the timing is bad. Recent work is in the gallery, and the contact page gets you on the schedule.