Where the camera goes on a narrow Chicago lot, and what the alley shows

There is no yard to back into, so the alley is your camera position

Lots here are narrow enough that nearly every roofing shot in this city gets framed off the rear alley or a back porch, and that decides what you can film.

On a standard lot the neighbor's building sits a few feet from your ladder. There is no lawn to stand on for the wide establishing shot that national roofing videos are built around, and the front of the house is a parkway tree and a sidewalk.

So the frames that work are close ones. Up the parapet wall, along the coping, down a valley, across the roof to the alley below.

Alley footage also carries the staging story, which is what a neighbor wants settled before anybody hires you: where the dumpster goes, whether the garage gets blocked, what the gangway looks like once the crew packs up.

Drone footage sounds like the fix and mostly is not. Dense blocks and wires strung over the alley make it a planned exercise rather than a habit, and anything involving airspace is worth confirming against current FAA guidance before anyone flies.

The garage on the alley is a second flat roof, and it goes first

Nearly every lot in the bungalow belt carries a detached garage at the back, and the roof on it is a job of its own that the owner has never priced.

A garage roof here is low-slope, small, and covered in whatever was cheapest the last time anybody thought about it. It sits behind the building where nobody walks, and it is usually failing while the roof over the house is still fine.

Owners find out at a sale. An inspector walks the alley, writes up standing water and a lifted edge, and a closing that had nothing to do with roofing needs a roofer inside two weeks. Work with a deadline on it, and almost nobody in this trade publishing about it.

Film it from the alley, where the crew already parks. A garage is one of the few low-slope roofs you can show properly from ground level: water sitting in a corner, a cap sheet torn along a seam, a deck that has started to sag, the service line running over the whole thing.

Say out loud that the two roofs are separate decisions. Owners assume the house and the garage arrive as one bill and are relieved to hear otherwise, and the smaller job is how a company gets onto a block a few years before the larger one comes due.

A second layer of shingles is the whole price conversation here

On a century-old bungalow the number in your proposal moves once the tear-off starts, and a feed is where an owner learns that before they collect three bids.

Buildings that have stood this long have been re-covered more than once. Crews find a second layer, sometimes a third, plank decking with gaps you can see daylight through, and a chimney flashed with tar by somebody in a hurry decades ago.

Film the moment the layers come off. Hold the shot on the deck, say what you would do about it, and say what it does to the schedule.

An owner who has watched that once reads two different bids differently. You are not arguing with a competitor. You are showing somebody what is probably under their own shingles.

Say what you cannot tell from the ground, because on a bungalow nobody knows how many layers are up there until a shovel goes in. Certainty on camera about a building you have not been on shows up later in a review.

A thaw turns the account into a help desk for about three days

The stretch when a hard freeze breaks is the loudest week of your year, and almost none of that attention is ready to buy a roof.

Water shows up on a ceiling in Logan Square and in Oak Park on the same afternoon. Phones ring, comment sections fill, and every roofer in Cook County is already booked.

Stop selling for those days. Post what to do in the first hour: where to put the bucket, what to photograph, why nobody should be up a ladder chipping at an ice dam with a hammer, and what usually happens to shingles that get chipped.

The people you help in that hour are not this week's customers. Freeze and thaw runs through several cycles a winter here, and the account that was useful in January is the one a homeowner remembers in April when the snow is gone and the roof still needs replacing.

Answer the thread as yourself and keep it short. Saying a leak is more likely an ice dam than a failed roof, and worth confirming with somebody on a ladder, costs you a call today and reads as honest to everybody else watching.

Cadence, who carries the camera and when paid money is worth spending do not change between here and anywhere else, and we handle those once on our roofing social media page at /industries/roofing/social-media.