Local Expertise
Roofing and Stucco in Hempstead, NY
Hempstead is two places with one name, and it matters the moment somebody pulls a permit. The incorporated Village of Hempstead runs its own Building Department. West Hempstead and Uniondale are unincorporated and file with the Town of Hempstead instead. Same mailing address line, different desk, different turnaround. We have filed in both. When we quote a roof here we tell you which one applies to your address up front, not after a stop work order.
The housing is mostly post-war. Capes and ranches from roughly 1947 through the mid fifties, mid-century Colonials, older Tudors nearer the village center, and two-family conversions through the grid off Fulton Avenue and Peninsula Boulevard. The Cape is what we get called to most. Almost every one of them had a shed or doghouse dormer added later to finish the upstairs, and the flashing where that dormer wall meets the main roof is where the water gets in. It is not a subtle leak either. The dormer sits over a finished bedroom, so instead of a stain on attic sheathing you get a wet ceiling. By the time it shows, the sheathing behind that flashing has usually been wet for two or three seasons.
The other thing we find constantly on these houses is two layers of shingle. New York State lets you re-cover once. After that the old covering comes off, no argument. A fifties Cape that was re-roofed in the eighties and again around 2005 is already at the limit, and the second layer is hiding whatever the first one was hiding. We check the rake edge and pull a vent before we quote, because a re-cover and a full tear-off are not the same price and you should know which one you are buying.
Fulton Avenue and Main Street are a different job altogether. Storefronts with apartments over them, flat decks in torch-down or modified bitumen, parapets that were pointed once in forty years. Leaks on those buildings almost never start in the field of the roof. They start at the parapet cap or where the deck ties into the neighbor's wall. We also do the stucco on the two-family homes near Front Street and Peninsula Boulevard, where fifties and sixties stucco has let go of the sheathing behind it. Patching a wall that sounds hollow is money thrown away. It has to come back to solid substrate.
What we see in 11550, 11552 and 11553: 11550 is the Village core, 11552 is West Hempstead, 11553 is Uniondale, and 11549 is Hofstra. The recurring list: shed dormer flashing on post-war Capes, two existing shingle layers that rule out a re-cover, fascia and soffit gone soft behind gutters nobody cleaned, parapet failures on the Fulton Avenue storefronts, and stucco delaminated from the sheathing on the fifties two-family homes.
- Shed dormer and roof-to-wall flashing rebuilt, not caulked over
- Full tear-offs where a second layer rules out a re-cover
- Architectural shingle on Capes, ranches and Colonials
- Flat roofs and parapet rebuilds on the Fulton Avenue storefronts
- Stucco taken back to solid substrate on the two-family homes
- Gutters and leaders sized for a dormered Cape roof
- 24/7 emergency leak response across central Nassau
📞 Serving the Village of Hempstead, West Hempstead, Uniondale, Garden City South, Roosevelt, Baldwin and Freeport. Call (516) 713-9199 for a free estimate.
