Recent skylight work
Bayside is the part of Queens that does not look like Queens. Detached single family houses on real lots, colonials and capes and the odd Tudor, and almost all of it under a pitched asphalt shingle roof. Bayside Hills and Oakland Gardens are rows of them. Bay Terrace adds co-op garden apartments on the north side. The roofs here are nothing like the flat decks we work on in Sunnyside or Woodside, and the skylight that belongs on them is a different unit.
On a pitched shingle roof the right answer is usually a deck mounted unit with its own step flashing kit, woven into the shingle courses the way a chimney is. It sits low, it sheds water by design rather than by sealant, and it is the detail that makes the difference between a skylight that lasts twenty years and one that stains the ceiling in year three. Every deck mounted unit we fit gets the flashing kit, always, and it is in the price.
The other Bayside call is the attic. These houses have real attics with headroom, and a finished room up there lives or dies on daylight and ventilation. A roof window that opens, or a pair of them, turns a storage space into a bedroom or an office. Replacement on a sound curb starts at $2,079 installed and a new opening starts at $3,500.
Leaking skylight in Bayside? Start with a professional assessment from New York's original skylight specialists. Skylights are all we have done since 2005: licensed and insured (LIC# 2084179), VELUX Trained & Approved, an official VELUX dealer, 4.9 stars on Google, and a 10-Year No Leak Warranty on every unit we install. Roofers and handymen do skylights on the side; we are the specialists the roofers call. Water dripping from the skylight, a stain on the ceiling under it, a drip that only shows up in a heavy rain: none of that tells you what actually failed. We come out, find the real cause, and give you a straight answer and a price for the right fix, which is usually a new unit. Active leaks go to the front of the schedule.
Deck mount, in almost every case. On a shingle roof a deck mounted unit with a step flashing kit is woven into the shingle courses so the roof sheds water over it the way it does over a chimney. A curb belongs on a flat roof. Putting a curb on a shingle roof is one of the commonest reasons we get called back to somebody else's work.
Daylight and a way to move air, and usually that means a unit that opens rather than a fixed one. If the room is going to be slept in there are code requirements about light and ventilation and sometimes about egress, and those depend on how the room is classified. We look at the framing and the headroom and tell you what the roof will take.
No. A deck mounted unit goes into an existing shingle roof and the flashing kit integrates with the courses around it. If the roof is near the end of its life we will say so, because doing both at once saves you paying twice for the same staging, but it is not a condition of the work.
Yes. Venting units open by hand crank, by electric motor or by solar motor with a remote, and every venting unit comes with an insect screen. A solar venting unit needs no electrician, which matters in a finished attic where fishing a wire means opening a ceiling you just closed.
Not if it is flashed properly. Nearly every leaking skylight we are called to on a pitched roof is leaking because somebody set it in sealant instead of fitting the step flashing, and sealant has a service life measured in a few years. A correctly flashed unit on a sound roof is not a leak risk. It is the detail, not the skylight.
All of it. Bayside Hills, Oakland Gardens, Bay Terrace and the blocks down to the Cross Island. That is 11361 and 11360, and we are over in Douglaston, Little Neck and Whitestone just as often.
Flushing · Forest Hills · Kew Gardens · Jackson Heights · Astoria
We cover every part of the borough. See skylights in Queens, our published prices, or NYC permits and landmark rules. Serving 11361 and 11360.