Roofing in Orange, NJ

A roof job starts with the tear off, not the new material. We strip the old shingles or the old flat roof down to the deck and look at what is actually holding the house up. On the older homes around Orange, that deck is often original, and it is common to find soft or delaminated wood wherever water has been getting past the shingles for years without anyone noticing from inside. Any of that gets cut out and replaced before a single new shingle goes down.

Shingle roofs and flat roofs fail in different places, so they get looked at differently. On a shingle roof, most leaks start at a valley, a chimney, or a pipe boot that has dried out and cracked in the sun. On a flat roof over a porch or rear addition, the trouble is usually ponding water sitting on a low spot or a seam that was never sealed right. New Jersey winters make both worse. Ice can back up under shingles at the eaves without a membrane there, and a flat roof with poor drainage holds snowmelt right where it is weakest.

If a roof is only a few years past its prime and leaking in one or two spots, that may be a repair rather than a full replacement, and we will tell you which one it actually needs before we give you a number.