Ridgewood NJ Roofing, Chimney, Siding & Masonry Contractor

Era by Era: What Gives Out First

On the 1890s Shingle Style houses in Brookside, the failure is almost always at the transitions — turret to main roof, valley into valley.

Those roofs have more linear feet of edge than open plane. Edge is where water gets a chance to sit, and where old flashing gives up.

On the Tudor and Revival houses of the Old Country Club era, the pitch is steep and sheds well, but the dormer cheeks and intersecting gables collect.

Foursquare and Prairie roofs from the Floral Park period do the opposite. Low pitch, wide eaves, slow shedding, and ice that backs up under the first course.

On the Glen Acres and The Lawns Capes, the roof itself is simple and the dormers are not. That is where seventy years of patching usually shows.

What You Can See From the Driveway

You do not need to get on a ladder to know something is wrong. Most of the early signs are visible from the street.

• Slate or cedar courses that have slipped, cracked or gone missing entirely

• Dark staining running down a chimney stack or below a valley line

• Mortar crumbling out of a crown or a shoulder above the roof

• Gutter lines pulling away from the fascia once the leaves come down

Any one of those on its own is a repair. Two or three together usually means water has already been inside the structure for a while.

Photograph what you can see and send it over. We would rather look at a picture than talk you into an inspection you do not need.

The Stack Is Usually Older Than the Roof

On a house from the 1890s or 1900s, the chimney was built with the house. The roof has been replaced two or three times since.

So the newest thing on the roof meets the oldest thing on the building, and the joint between them is where the trouble starts.

Every re-roof cuts and re-cuts that joint. After enough cycles, the masonry around it has been chipped, patched and sealed more times than anyone can count.

That is why our the stack rebuilds we run on Ridgewood’s pre-1940 houses gets quoted alongside the roof on older Ridgewood houses, rather than as a separate visit six months later.

Crowns, Chases and Rebuilding From the Roofline Up

A crown is the sloped cap on top of the stack. It is the part that fails first and the part nobody ever looks at.

When a crown cracks, water goes straight down inside the masonry instead of running off it. The damage then shows up several feet lower.

If the crown has gone but the stack below it is sound, we recast the crown and leave the rest alone. That is a one-day job.

If the top courses are spalling and the mortar has turned to sand, we take the stack down to solid work and rebuild from there.

On framed chases we treat the chase cover and the counterflashing as one detail, because water finds whichever of the two is weaker.

 

Why the Slate Is Fine and the Flashing Is Not

Most chimney leaks are not chimney leaks. They are flashing leaks at the point where the stack passes through the roof plane.

Step flashing goes up the side of the stack in pieces, one per course. Counterflashing sits in a cut in the mortar and laps over it.

When someone runs a bead of sealant across that joint instead of cutting new counterflashing, it holds for two winters and then it does not.

We see plenty of that on houses re-roofed by three different crews across forty years. Each one covered over the shortcut the last one left.

The fix is to cut a fresh reglet, set new counterflashing into it, and let the metal do the work instead of the caulk.

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Siding That Belongs on the House

Shingle Style, Tudor, Craftsman and Mediterranean Revival each arrived with their own wall treatment, and the wall treatment is half the design.

Put flat vinyl on a 1910 Craftsman and the house reads wrong from the street, even to people who could not tell you why.

Put it on a house inside the Village Center Historic District and you have a review problem sitting on top of an aesthetic one.

So we start from what is there — cedar shingle, clapboard, stucco panel, half-timber infill — and work out what can honestly be matched.

 

Patch, Panel or the Whole Elevation

Siding decisions come down to how much of the wall is bad and whether you can still buy the profile that is on it.

If the damage is confined to one elevation and the material is still available, we replace that elevation and blend the edges into the rest.

If the profile is discontinued, a patch will always show. At that point a full re-side is often cheaper than three failed attempts at matching.

We will tell you which of those you are looking at before you commit, and we will say so if the honest answer is do nothing yet.

 

What We Fit on Pre-War Ridgewood Houses

Material choice on an older house is not about the best product in the catalog. It is about what the building and the district will accept.

On roofs we work with slate, synthetic slate, cedar and architectural asphalt, and we are honest about what each one costs to maintain over time.

On walls we fit cedar shingle and clapboard, fiber cement, engineered wood and vinyl, depending on the house and on where in the village it sits.

• Natural slate, salvaged or new, matched to the existing course and exposure

• Synthetic slate where the frame will not carry the real weight

• Cedar shingle and shake, replaced like for like on period walls

• Architectural asphalt on the postwar Capes, where it actually belongs

One material note worth stating plainly. Under N.J.A.C. 5:23-2.7 Ordinary Maintenance, replacing existing siding needs no construction permit — except polypropylene, which does.

The same rule covers replacing existing roof covering on detached one- and two-family homes. Roof sheathing and structural work are not exempt from it.

 

Steps, Walls and the Ground Beneath Them

The masonry on an older Ridgewood property tends to be the last thing anyone budgets for and the first thing a visitor walks on.

Front steps, stoops, walkways, garden walls, retaining walls holding a grade change — all of it moves with the ground and with the season.

Our masonry repair and rebuilding covers those as one trade, because the step, the wall and the drainage behind them are really one problem.

 

Repointing Without Breaking the Brick

Repointing is not filling gaps. It is cutting out failed mortar to a proper depth and replacing it with something the wall can live with.

The mortar in an old wall is softer than the brick or stone around it by design. It is meant to be the part that gives.

Hit that wall with a hard modern mix and the mortar stops yielding. The face of the brick spalls off instead, and that is not repairable.

So the mix gets matched to the wall, and the joint gets matched to the original profile — flush, struck, raked or beaded, whatever is already there.

Worth knowing: the state’s ordinary maintenance rule covers liquid-applied chimney lining, but says nothing about repointing. We confirm the permit position before we start.

 

What the Freeze-Thaw Cycle Does Down There

Water gets into a joint, freezes, expands, and opens that joint slightly. Then it thaws, more water gets in, and it happens again.

Do that a few dozen times a winter for thirty winters and a set of front steps comes apart quietly from the inside.

The visible symptoms are a riser that has dropped, a tread that rocks underfoot, or a handrail post that has gone loose in its pocket.

Underneath, it is usually the base and the drainage. Steps built on fill with nowhere for water to go will move however good the stonework is.

Deicing salt makes it worse. It drives more freeze-thaw cycles per winter than weather alone would, and it works the mortar joint from the top down.

So we look at where the roof water lands before rebuilding anything. If your downspouts discharge at the top of a wall, that wall will keep failing.

 

The Ridgewood Rule Worth Reading Twice

In the Village Center Historic District, § 190-97D(2)(b) exempts from Historic Preservation Commission review the maintenance and repair of existing roofing materials involving no change in design, scale or appearance, and like-for-like siding replacement.

Read that boundary carefully, because it is the whole point. Slate for slate is exempt. Slate for asphalt is a change in appearance and is not. Cedar for cedar is exempt; cedar for vinyl is not.

Two other local items belong here. Ridgewood is a CRS Class 6 community, which affects flood insurance rates, and tree removal permits start at 8 inches in diameter.

• Decide first whether you are matching the existing material or changing it

• If matching, confirm the exemption with the Building Department in writing

• If changing, allow time for Historic Preservation Commission review before ordering

• Hazard-tree removal needs a licensed tree expert to verify the condition

 

Licensed, Insured and Working on These Streets

We hold New Jersey Home Improvement Contractor registration #13VH13359900 and we carry insurance. Ask any contractor for both before you let them on the property.

Twenty-five years of that work has been on Bergen County houses, where 74.6 percent of the housing stock went up before 1980.

That matters more than it sounds. Most of what we do is second, third or fourth work on a building somebody else already touched.

So the first hour on site usually goes on finding out what was done before, by whom, and why it eventually stopped working.

Working in a village this old means knowing what you are allowed to disturb, not only what you are technically able to fix.

And we will tell you when a repair is the right call and a replacement is not, even though the replacement pays us better.

 

A Written Scope Before You Decide Anything

Estimates are free and there is no charge for the inspection that produces one. We would rather look and tell you it can wait.

The scope you get is written: what comes off, what goes on, how the flashing is detailed, and what happens if we find bad sheathing.

Financing is available when the number is bigger than the month allows. A slate roof and a Cape Cod roof are different conversations.

Call when you are ready. We work right across the village — Brookside, Old Country Club, The Heights, Floral Park, Glen Acres, The Lawns and Upper Ridgewood.

 

The Villages and Townships Around Us

Pre-1940 housing does not end at the village line. Glen Rock shares the Mission tile and the Tudors directly to the south. West, Wyckoff’s split-levels fail at the roof-plane junction instead. Further north we cover Ramsey and Mahwah , where elevation and tree cover change the job again.