Fair Lawn Roofing, Chimney, Siding and Masonry Contractor

Two Rivers, and the March the Pool Went Under

The Passaic River runs along the western edge of the borough. The Saddle River comes in from the northeast. Neither is far from anybody here.

When the Passaic crested in March 2011, it closed River Road south of Morlot Avenue, closed 2nd Street, and closed Wagaraw Road between Lincoln and Maple at the Hawthorne border.

The Memorial Park pool went completely under. That is the kind of event people here measure other storms against.

Most of the borough is nowhere near that. River flooding is a specific problem on specific streets, and it is not what brings us to most houses.

The water that damages the average house here did not come from a river. It came off the roof and landed in the wrong place.

Roof Water Is the Part You Control

Undersized gutters and the leaders below them discharging next to the foundation make a wet-weather problem worse than it has to be. On a 1950s house the gutters are often original and half the size they should be.

• Gutter capacity against the actual roof area feeding each run

• Where every downspout ends, and how far from the foundation wall

• Grade and splash zone under each leader after a hard rain

• Valleys, kick-out flashing and the wall below every roof-to-wall junction

We check those four things on every estimate, because a new roof over a bad discharge point just moves the same water faster.

Ground matters too. If the soil at the corner of the house is scoured out, something above it has been overflowing for years.

Reroofing in a Borough That Stays Damp

A repair is the right answer more often than people expect. A dozen cracked tabs, a lifted ridge cap, one bad boot around a vent pipe.

It stops being the right answer when the deck is soft, when granule loss is general rather than local, or when you are on your second patch in the same valley.

Under N.J.A.C. 5:23-2.7, replacing the existing roof covering on a detached one- or two-family home is ordinary maintenance and needs no construction permit. Sheathing and structural work are not exempt.

We will tell you which side of that line your job sits on, and show you the photograph that made us say it.

Storm Calls, From Radburn Slate to Post-War Asphalt

Storm calls are triaged, not queued. If water is coming into a bedroom tonight, that is a different phone call than a missing ridge cap.

The first job is to stop the ingress. A properly fastened tarp, run over the ridge and secured on both slopes, buys the time to do the repair properly.

The second job is documentation. Every photograph gets taken before the tarp goes on, since the tarp then hides the exact thing an adjuster has to look at.

Being based in Bergen County is the whole point of calling a local contractor after a storm. Nobody is starting the drive to Fair Lawn from the far side of the state.

Wind damage is often not where the ceiling stain is. We look at the windward slope, the rakes and the ridge before we look at the stain.

 

What a 1953 Roof Hides Under the Shingles

A full replacement is the only time you get to see the deck. That is when soft sheathing, old repairs and rotten nailers stop being guesses.

Replacing roof sheathing is structural work. It is not covered by the ordinary maintenance exemption, and we settle that difference before the tear-off, not after.

Underlayment is where a wet-climate roof is won. Ice and water membrane at the eaves, in the valleys and around every penetration, then synthetic across the field.

More jobs go wrong on ventilation than on any other single detail. A roof that cannot breathe cooks its own shingles from underneath and sweats onto the insulation in winter.

On a steep Radburn pitch, gutters and drip edge deserve more attention than usual, because a steep slope delivers the same rainfall to the eave much faster.

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A Stack That Has Been Wet for Years

By the time a chimney shows a stain on the ceiling below, the masonry has usually been taking water for several seasons.

Brick absorbs. A saturated stack freezes, spalls the face off the brick, and opens the joints wider for the next storm.

Most of our chimney work in Fair Lawn starts as a roof leak that turned out to be the crown, the counterflashing or an unlined flue.

A cracked crown is the cheapest thing on that list to fix and the most expensive thing to ignore.

 

Repointing, Rebuilding and Relining

Sound brick with failed joints is a repointing job, not a rebuild. Grind the failed joints out to depth, repack them, and match the mortar to what is already there.

When the brick faces have popped off, repointing is cosmetic. Rebuilding the stack from the roofline up is the honest answer, and we say it out loud.

Relining matters most on the older stacks. An unlined or cracked flue is a combustion problem before it is ever a water problem.

A new cap and a properly sloped crown finish the job. Both are small items that decide how long everything under them lasts.

 

Where the Water Actually Gets In

Leak tracing is the part of this trade people do badly. Water travels along rafters and shows up in a room nowhere near the hole.

So we start at the stain and work uphill, checking every penetration above it before anyone suggests replacing a whole slope.

In practice the entry point is almost always one of a short list, and it is almost never the middle of a healthy shingle field.

• Step flashing and counterflashing wherever a slope dies into a chimney or a wall

• Failed rubber boots around plumbing vents, cracked and split with age

• Valley metal that has corroded through or was never lapped correctly

• Nail pops, exposed fasteners and skylight curbs that were never flashed

Once we find it, we tell you what it is, not what it might be. Guesswork gets billed twice.

On a slate roof the trace is slower, because you cannot walk it the way you walk asphalt and every broken slate is another leak.

 

Siding, and Rain That Arrives Sideways

Rain that falls straight down is a roof problem. Rain driven sideways at a wall is a siding problem, and the two fail differently.

Wind-driven rain finds the gaps: an unsealed butt joint, a missing J-channel, the top of a window where the flashing was skipped.

The wall then dries inward instead of outward, which is how a siding fault turns into a framing bill.

 

What Sits Behind the Cladding

Siding is a rain screen, not a seal. Whatever gets past it has to meet a drainage plane and be shown a way back out.

On houses of this era the housewrap is often missing, torn, or lapped the wrong way at the window heads. We look before we quote.

Like-for-like siding replacement is ordinary maintenance too, with one exception the state names outright: polypropylene siding is not exempt, and that is worth knowing before you choose a product.

A partial repair makes sense when the damage is localized and the material still matches. It stops making sense when three walls are chalked and brittle.

Where an older wall already carries a second skin of aluminum or vinyl, the drainage plane behind it is an unknown until we open a section. We open one.

 

Steps, Walls and Where the Downspout Lands

Front steps fail from the back. Water gets behind the tread, freezes, and pushes the whole assembly away from the house a fraction at a time.

Before you blame the steps, find out where the nearest leader is putting its water. The two are often within a few feet of each other.

Our masonry work covers repointing, step rebuilds, stoops, walkways and retaining walls, and most of it starts as a drainage conversation.

A retaining wall without working weep holes is a dam. Soaked ground behind it has nowhere to go, so it leans on the wall until the wall moves.

Walkways that pitch back toward the house send every storm to the foundation. Relaying them at the right fall costs less than chasing the damp inside.

Mortar matters more than people think. Hard modern mortar on soft old brick spalls the brick instead of the joint, which is the wrong thing to sacrifice.

 

What Fair Lawn Licenses, and What It Does Not

Fair Lawn does not license home improvement contractors. Chapter 137 covers bowling alleys, carnivals, dry cleaners and taxis; roofing is not on the list. State HIC registration governs instead.

Tree work is the exception. Since March 2024, tree care contractors must register annually, hold current NJ Tree Experts and Tree Care Operators licensing, carry $1,000,000 in general liability and pay per vehicle.

On Radburn, the borough’s Historic Preservation Commission is advisory. It issues no certificate of appropriateness and has no design review over roofing, though it can impose a twelve-month permit moratorium on a designated site.

• Confirm the contractor’s state registration; ours is NJ HIC #13VH13359900

• On a Radburn property, call the Radburn Association on 201-796-1300 first

• Ask whether the scope stops at the roof covering or touches sheathing

• If trees need cutting for access, check that contractor’s borough registration

 

Licensed, Insured, and Already Working Here

We are registered in New Jersey as HIC #13VH13359900. Ask for the number, and ask the next contractor for theirs.

Twenty-five years of this work in Bergen County means very little on a roof in this borough surprises us anymore.

Insurance matters more than people check. Ask for the certificate, and confirm it covers the work and the people doing it.

We would rather lose a job than sell one. If a repair will hold for a few more seasons, that is what the estimate will say.

Roofing, chimney, siding and masonry sit under one contractor here, which matters when the leak turns out to be the stack rather than the shingles.

By itself, none of that earns the job. It is the baseline you should expect from anyone you let on a Fair Lawn roof.

 

Free Estimates, and Paying Over Time

An estimate here is free and carries no obligation at all. What you end up holding is a written scope, a number, and the photographs behind both.

Financing is available when the number is larger than the month allows, which on a full slate roof is a real conversation.

We will also price the phased version where phasing is honest, the leaking slope now and the sound one next year, and say when it is not.

Whether it is a ceiling stain, a gutter that spills over in every storm, or a front step that has shifted, we want the call. All three are the same conversation.

 

The Boroughs Either Side of Us

South across the river, Elmwood Park and Garfield deal with the same Passaic flooding on much denser streets. North, Glen Rock shares our 1920s Tudor and Mission-tile roofs and the same 6-inch tree threshold. We work all four in the same week.