Lyons Roofs Get Fixed, Not Oversold

Old Frame Houses And What They Hide

Lyons grew up along Ogden Avenue, the stretch that carried Route 66 traffic west out of Chicago, and along the Des Plaines crossing that made this a stopping point long before that. What is left is a village of small, older, mostly wood-frame houses, plenty of them from the 1910s through the 1940s, with a mix of postwar builds and small apartment buildings filling in. Detached garages behind almost everything, many of them with roofs older than the house’s.

On houses this age, the roof problem is often not the roof surface at all. Water that has been running down a bad fascia line for years rots the fascia board, then the rafter tails behind it, then the sheathing edge. From the ground you see peeling paint and a sagging gutter. From a ladder you find that there is nothing solid left to hang a gutter on, which is why the last set kept pulling away. Nailing a new gutter into rotten wood is a repair that fails by next spring.

That is why so much of our Lyons work is structural repair before anything else. We cut out the bad fascia and rafter tails, sister or replace what needs it, rebuild the edge with new sheathing and drip edge, and then hang gutters into wood that will actually hold them. It is not glamorous and it does not photograph well, but it is the difference between fixing the problem and covering it up.

What Lyons Calls Us For

• Shingle roof repair on wind-lifted slopes, cracked pipe boots, failed valleys and the single-spot leaks that do not need a whole roof.
• Gutter replacement and gutter repair, including rebuilding the fascia so the new gutter has something to attach to.
• Gutter installation with downspouts run well away from the foundation, which matters more here than in most towns.
• Storm damage repair and emergency patching when a limb or a wind event opens up a slope.
• Shingle roof replacement when the roof genuinely has nothing left, including the garage in the same visit so you are not paying two mobilizations.

The River Changes The Math

The Des Plaines runs right along Lyons, and the low ground near it has a long memory. Basements here take on water in heavy rain seasons, and homeowners understandably start blaming the roof when the ceiling and the basement go wrong in the same week. They are usually separate problems, but the roof water path is one of the few parts of it you can actually control for a reasonable price.

Practically, that means your gutters need to be big enough for a real Chicago downpour, your downspouts need to discharge several feet from the wall instead of into a splash block that has sunk toward the house, and any buried leader lines need to be clear or abandoned. We check all of that when we are up there. Fixing the water path will not stop a river from rising, but it will stop your own roof from adding a few hundred gallons a storm to the ground beside your foundation.

Straight Pricing For A Working Town

We do not do the high-pressure routine. You call, describe what is happening, and we usually pull satellite measurements while you are on the phone so you get a real number instead of a mystery. If the fix is a few hundred dollars of repair work, we say so. If the roof is done and you need a replacement, we say that too and we show you the photos that back it up. When the number is more than the timing allows, we can help get you pre-approved for financing so the work happens now instead of after the next ceiling stain.

Angelo Ristich runs the crews and inspects the jobs himself. He learned this trade from his father Frank, and Guardian has been working Cook County since 2013. We are A+ rated with the BBB, hold a HomeAdvisor Elite Service award, and carry Illinois licensing and insurance. Permits, when Lyons requires them, are our paperwork, not yours.

Two-Flats And The Small Buildings

Mixed in with the single-family houses are a lot of two-flats, three-flats and six-unit buildings, and those come with a different set of problems than an owner-occupied bungalow. Many of them have a low-slope rear section over a back porch or an addition, sometimes with a rubber membrane that has gone brittle and sometimes with rolled roofing that somebody laid down in the eighties. That is where the leaks start, and it is almost never visible from the street.

Owners of those buildings usually want two things from us: a number that will not move, and work that does not generate a week of tenant phone calls. So we look at the whole building including the porches, we write the scope so a landlord can see exactly what is included, and we schedule the noisy part of the day to start at a reasonable hour rather than at seven. If a unit is going to need interior access for a ceiling repair after the roof is right, we say that up front so nobody is surprised by a knock on a door.

The rear porch structures get the same treatment. If the porch framing carrying that roof section is unsound, we will tell you it is a carpentry job before it is a roofing job. We would rather lose the sale than put a new surface over something that needs a structural fix underneath it.

When Water Is Already Coming In

Emergencies get handled first. If a storm opened your roof on a Friday night, we would rather tarp and patch it Saturday morning than let you sit through a weekend of rain waiting for a Monday appointment. We have crews who have shoveled ice off a roof to patch it in January, and that is the standard here. Once you are dry, we schedule the real repair in decent conditions. Finished work is in the gallery, and you can send photos and an address through the contact page for a same-day callback.