Water Below The House, Weather Above It

An Old River Town With Old River Town Housing

Wilmington has been a town since the mill days, and the housing near the river and the downtown reflects it: nineteenth century frame houses, brick storefronts along the highway with low-slope roofs behind decorative fronts, and older neighborhoods where the lots follow the water instead of a grid. Out from there you get the twentieth century in the usual order, ranches, split levels and newer construction on the edges toward the interstate.

Two things separate a river town from an inland one when it comes to roofing. The first is humidity and shade. Properties near the water hold moisture longer, which means north-facing slopes grow moss and algae faster, and organic debris sits wet in gutters instead of drying out. The second is that everybody here already thinks about water at ground level, and not enough people think about the roof as the top of that same system.

Where Your Roof Water Ends Up Matters More Here

In a town where high water is a live topic, dumping several thousand gallons a year off your roof directly against your own foundation is a bad plan. We check the whole path on every inspection: gutter size, run pitch, number of downspouts, and where the discharge actually goes. Undersized runs that overflow in a hard rain send that water straight down the wall, and short downspouts that end six inches from the foundation do the same thing more politely.

It is not complicated to fix. Correct pitch, enough downspouts for the roof area, and extensions that carry water away from the house. Gutter installation sized properly for the roof handles it on new work, and gutter repair covers the sagging and separated runs that are already causing problems. If you already have a wet basement, this is the cheapest thing to rule out before you spend real money underground.

What We Do In Wilmington

• Shingle roof replacement on everything from old frame houses near the river to newer builds out toward I-55.
• Gutter installation and replacement sized and pitched to move water away from the foundation.
• Metal roof repair on outbuildings, barns and the metal-clad additions common on the properties out of town.
• Flat roof repair on the Route 66 storefronts, most of which are low-slope behind a decorative front.
• Storm damage repair and wind damage repair, documented for the insurance claim before cleanup.

The Downtown Storefronts Are A Specialty, Not A Sideline

The business buildings along the old highway are mostly nineteenth and early twentieth century masonry with flat or nearly flat roofs hidden behind a parapet. Those fail in specific places: at the parapet wall where the membrane turns up, at the scupper or drain, and at the joint where one building’s wall meets its neighbor’s. Chasing a leak in one of these is detective work, and replacing one badly means the tenant is dealing with it again in two years.

Flat roofing is what our shop specializes in, TPO and EPDM, coatings, and metal flashings for exactly these details. Commercial roofing covers how we schedule around a business’s hours, which for a downtown shop means we are not tearing the roof off during your Saturday.

Barns, Pole Buildings And The Rest Of The Property

Plenty of Wilmington addresses are more than a house. Once you get out past the village limits there are pole buildings, machine sheds, detached shops and the occasional actual barn, most of them under corrugated or standing seam metal that has been up for thirty or forty years. Those roofs almost never need replacing when people think they do. What fails first is the fastener: the neoprene washer under the screw head goes hard, cracks, and lets water run down the shank into the purlin. Multiply that by a few thousand screws and the building starts dripping everywhere at once, which reads like a dead roof and usually is not.

The honest repair is refastening with oversized screws and fresh washers, butyl tape at the end laps, and correct flashing where somebody bolted a lean-to or a canopy onto the side without detailing it. That runs a fraction of a new roof and buys another long stretch. We will tell you when a panel is genuinely rusted through at the low end and needs replacing, but we are not going to quote you a whole building because the screws are tired.

Storms Come Across Open Ground Before They Get Here

West of town is farm country all the way out, so cells arrive with nothing having slowed them down. Wind is the usual damage rather than hail, and the older houses take it at the edges: ridge and hip caps first, edge and drip metal at the corners, then the wall-to-roof intersection on houses with additions. Get a look within a couple of weeks of any storm even if nothing is dripping, because lifted material does not leak in July and does leak in February.

Wilmington is a real drive from our shop in Alsip, so we schedule this end of the county in batches. Planned work lands inside a week or two and we tell you the real window rather than the flattering one. Leaks move up the list. Angelo Ristich runs the company his father Frank trained him in and supervises the work himself, so the person who answers for the job is the one who stood on your roof. Straightforward roofs get priced from satellite measurements while you are on the phone, and financing help is available. Guardian has been at this since 2013, A+ with the BBB, HomeAdvisor Elite Service award, licensed and insured in Illinois. Recent work is photographed in the gallery, and the contact page gets you a callback the same business day.