Roofing Contractor in Cedar Lake, Indiana

Cedar Lake’s stock spans early-20th-century lakefront cottages with shallow attics and add-on rooflines and newer subdivision homes with steeper, architectural-shingle roofs. The older cottages are ice-dam prone: heat escapes into cold attic space, melts the snowpack, and the runoff freezes at the eaves, forcing water back under the shingles and into the walls and ceilings.

Our fix for these is systematic — generous ice-and-water shield along the eaves and valleys, a real tear-off with decking repair, and improved intake-and-ridge ventilation plus air sealing so the roof stays cold and the snow doesn’t melt unevenly. On the newer homes we inspect flashing, boots and nailing and correct builder defects, and where a roof is failing we replace it with a properly detailed, well-vented system.

We work throughout Cedar Lake near landmarks like the Cedar Lake beach and boardwalk, the Lassen’s Resort Museum, and the shops along Wicker Avenue and Lake Shore Drive. On a converted cottage near the lakefront, chronic winter ceiling stains came from ice dams; we added eave-to-eave ice-and-water shield, corrected the ventilation, and reshingled, ending the seasonal leaks.

On Cedar Lake’s converted lakefront cottages, the ice-and-water shield everyone talks about is only half the ice-dam fix — the real cure is up in the attic. These old Lake Shore Drive cottages leak warm household air through can lights, chimney chases, and top plates; that heat melts the snowpack unevenly and the runoff refreezes over the cold eave. So before we ever reshingle, we air-seal those bypasses and bring the insulation up to depth so the deck stays cold, then add balanced intake-and-ridge ventilation. The time to do it is early fall, ahead of the first lake-effect snow off the water near the beach and boardwalk — not mid-winter, chasing stains across the ceiling.

Beyond the ice dams, Cedar Lake’s old cottages carry another lakefront legacy: decades of add-ons that left a patchwork of roof planes at mismatched pitches. A sunporch tied into a 1950s original, a raised bedroom over the back — each junction is a roof-to-roof or roof-to-wall transition the first owner likely flashed by eye. Near the Lake Shore Drive cottages, those hand-sealed seams are exactly where we find the rot when a leak finally shows. A real re-roof here treats the whole cottage as one system: strip it, re-flash every pitch change and sidewall, and tie the additions back into the main roof so the lake wind quits finding the gaps.