Roofing Contractor in Hammond, Indiana

Most Hammond homes are 1900s-1940s frame bungalows and two-flats with steep gable roofs over the living space and shallow-pitch roofs over porches and rear additions. The pitched sections take architectural shingles, but the flat and low-slope porch roofs call for a proper membrane — a TPO or EPDM system or torch-applied modified bitumen — because layering shingles on a near-flat plane is a guaranteed leak.

On these older houses we routinely address dried, split porch membranes, rusted-through valley and step flashing, and ice-dam damage at the eaves where shallow attics and poor ventilation let heat melt snow that refreezes at the gutter line. We tear off, re-deck where needed, and detail the flashing transitions between the steep and flat roofs so the two systems actually work together.

We work throughout Hammond near landmarks like the Horseshoe casino district, Wolf Lake and Forsythe Park, and the shops along Hohman Avenue and Calumet Avenue. On a Hessville two-flat, a homeowner had chased porch leaks for years; we replaced the failed low-slope section with a fully adhered membrane and tied it cleanly into the main shingle roof, ending the drips for good.

Hammond’s shallow-attic bungalows are textbook ice-dam candidates, so on every tear-off in Hessville or Robertsdale we run self-adhering ice-and-water shield from the eave edge to at least 24 inches inside the warm-wall line — the detail that stops backed-up meltwater from wicking under the courses and staining plaster. The flat and low-slope porch roofs are the other half of the job, and those want a fully adhered TPO or EPDM membrane laid in mild weather: adhesives and seams cure poorly in a Calumet-region February, so we schedule membrane work for the warmer stretches and keep steep-slope shingle tear-offs moving year-round near Wolf Lake and Hohman Avenue.

Hammond’s pre-war housing carries tall brick chimneys, and on these Woodmar and North Hammond two-flats the leak almost always begins where old mortar-bedded flashing has failed against the masonry. A shingle-over that skips reglet-cut counter flashing just traps water behind the brick. On a proper tear-off we cut fresh step flashing into each course and set counter flashing into a ground-out mortar joint, then tie it to the field so the chimney and roof drain as one. Do this while the roof is open rather than chasing a chimney leak later, after it has already tracked down and stained the plaster in the rooms below.