Roof Repair & Replacement in Somerville, NJ

Hillsborough Roofing works on Somerville roofs, which is a different job from working out in the townships. The borough is barely two and a half square miles with more than five thousand people in each of them, so houses sit close, porches are deep, and driveways rarely hold a dumpster and a truck both. We plan the access before we plan the roof.

A borough that filled in around the railroad

Somerville grew fast once the railroad reached it in the 1840s, incorporated as a town in 1863, became a borough in 1909, and peaked in population in 1970. The building record runs through that whole span: tall Victorian frame houses with cross gables and decorative bargeboards, civic work like the white marble courthouse of 1909 and the Gothic borough hall, then a layer of 1920s foursquares and postwar capes behind Main.

The old commercial spine adds a third roof type. Factories and storefronts converted to offices and apartments carry flat and low-slope roofs, parapet walls, and built-up assemblies that need a membrane rather than shingles. Three eras, three ways of failing, often on one block.

What steep Victorian roofs in the borough ask for

The tall houses here pair steep main slopes with much shallower porch and bay roofs hung off them, and that pairing is where most of our Somerville leak calls come from.

Original slate and standing-seam metal still survives on some of these roofs, usually in patches under later asphalt. When we open one up we tell you what we found rather than guessing at the quote stage. Steep pitch is good for shingle life and bad for footing, so these jobs get staged with roof jacks and take longer than the square count suggests.

Porch roofs that die before the main roof

A wide front porch is nearly flat, sits under a wall, and collects everything running off the steep slope above it. Shingles on that pitch will not hold. The correct assembly is a low-slope membrane carried up the wall behind counter flashing, stepped properly rather than caulked. That one detail accounts for much of the water showing up in Somerville front rooms.

Cross gables, cheeks, and dormer flashing

Victorian rooflines are full of intersections. Every dormer cheek and gable return needs its own run of step flashing woven course by course, with counter flashing over it. On houses this old we regularly find one continuous strip of tin instead, or flashing buried when someone re-sided and never reset.

Brick chimneys through the ridge or slope

The borough is full of tall brick chimneys, and the flashing around them is usually older than the roof. Mortar joints open with freeze-thaw, counter flashing pulls out of the reglet, and the cricket behind a wide chimney is often missing. We reset flashing into the brick and build a cricket where the chimney is wide enough to dam water.

Peters Brook, Route 22, and the weather Somerville actually gets

The borough is flat, sits around sixty feet above sea level, has Peters Brook running through it, and takes the Raritan along its southern boundary. Hurricane Floyd dropped a record thirteen inches of rain over three days in September 1999, and volume like that is the real test of a roof edge. It finds undersized gutters, missing gutter apron, and any place the drip edge stops short.

Ordinary weather matters more day to day. Freeze-thaw works at old flashing and open mortar. Summer thunderstorms come off the Route 22 corridor with wind that lifts unsealed tabs. Ice dams build on north-facing eaves where the attic is under-insulated, which describes much of the older borough stock. We handle those on the roof leak repair side by finding the entry point rather than resurfacing the stain.

Before we quote a Somerville roof

• Where the truck, dumpster, and ladder can legally sit on a tight borough lot
• Whether there is slate or metal surviving under the asphalt
• Porch and bay roof pitch, and whether shingles were run out on them
• Chimney flashing, mortar condition, and whether a cricket is needed
• Gutter capacity and gutter apron at every eave, given how hard it rains here
• Attic insulation and ventilation, because ice dams here are a heat problem first
• Neighboring walls and fences that need protection when the tear-off comes down

Roofing and siding work we do in Somerville

• Roof Repair
• Roof Replacement
• Roof Leak Repair
• Emergency Roof Repair
• Storm & Hail Damage Repair
• Solar Panel Removal & Reinstall
• Skylight Replacement
• Roof Inspection
• Gutters, Soffit & Fascia
• Flat Roof Repair
• Siding Installation
• Vinyl Siding
• James Hardie Siding
• Siding Repair

Nearby towns

Bridgewater, Montgomery, Branchburg, Manville, Belle Mead, Neshanic Station, Raritan, and Hillsborough itself.