Roofing in Batavia, IL

Old Roofs Need a Different Conversation

A steep, cut-up roof on an 1890s house is not a bigger version of a subdivision roof. It has more valleys, more flashing, dormers, sometimes multiple additions at different pitches meeting at awkward angles, and framing that was sized by rule of thumb rather than by span table.

Three things follow. First, it takes longer, and any quote based on square footage alone will be wrong. Second, the flashing work is most of the job, since on a roof like that the failures are overwhelmingly at junctions rather than in the field. Third, we look in the attic properly before quoting, because on this stock the surprises are structural.

Ventilation on these houses is its own puzzle. Many were built with no soffit venting at all and nowhere obvious to add it, and the honest answer is sometimes a compromise rather than a textbook balanced system. We will tell you what is achievable rather than quoting an ideal we cannot deliver.

Slate Fails One Piece at a Time

The single most useful thing to know if you own a slate roof in Batavia. Asphalt fails across whole slopes; slate does not. Individual slates crack or slip while the ones beside them have another eighty years, and the nails and the flashings usually go before the slate does.

So a slate roof described as "leaking and needing replacement" very often needs a few hundred dollars of slates and some valley metal. We have talked people out of very large slate replacements more than once. The question is not how old it is, it is how many are actually broken and what the fixings and flashings look like. The detail is on the cedar and slate page.

Cedar, and Why the 1980s Ones Are Failing First

Batavia has cedar from two eras and they behave completely differently. Genuine old cedar, laid on skip sheathing so it can dry from underneath, lasts a long time and can often be repaired. Cedar from the 1980s and 1990s revival, frequently laid tight on solid decking over felt, holds moisture against its own back face and rots from behind.

If your cedar is the second kind you will see it failing at twenty-five rather than forty, and no amount of surface treatment fixes it because the problem is on the side you cannot see. Most people replacing that generation of cedar do not go back to cedar, partly because of maintenance and partly because some Illinois insurers have got difficult about wood roofs. Composite shake now reproduces the look convincingly at a fraction of the weight.