Pro24 Contracting handles roofing, siding, windows and gutters across Lake Elmo. This city has two very different kinds of property on the same roads: old farmstead acreage with outbuildings, and brand-new subdivisions built in the last fifteen years. Call 612-235-8696 and we will come look at yours.
Named after a novel
Bernard and Maria Cyphers arrived in 1848 and built the Lake House, a hotel and stage stop, south of Sunfish Lake. The lake and the settlement were called Bass Lake, and the post office opened in 1876 as Bass Lake Station.
In 1879 the railroad promoter Alpheus B. Stickney renamed it Lake Elmo after the 1866 novel St. Elmo, on the grounds that it sounded better. The railroad had reached the area in 1872 and turned it into a resort town for a while, with a fifty-eight-room hotel and county fairgrounds by 1875. The village incorporated in 1925 and merged with East Oakdale Township in 1972 to make the city.
Two kinds of house, two kinds of quote
Lake Elmo had 218 people in 1930 and 3,565 by 1970. It reached 6,863 in 2000 and 11,335 by 2020, and the growth has kept going.
Much of that recent building followed the city's long legal fight with the Metropolitan Council over sewered growth, which the state Supreme Court settled against the city in 2004. The result is a city where a new subdivision can sit a mile from a hundred-year-old farmstead. On the acreage side we quote the pole barns and detached garages along with the house, because hail does not skip them. On the new-construction side the question is usually a specific failure or storm damage rather than age.
Long drives, wells and septic fields
Lake Elmo runs about twenty-four square miles, much of it still farmland, on relatively flat ground. Houses on the rural side sit well back behind long private drives, and a good many run on a private well with their own septic system and drainfield.
That is a logistics problem before it is a roofing problem. A loaded delivery truck on a narrow drive, a dumpster that cannot sit on the drainfield, and a septic system nobody should be parking over. We walk the drive and mark what to avoid before anything is delivered, keep the working footprint tight, and clean the site daily.
Open ground, and what the wind does to it
Lake Elmo Park Reserve covers more than two thousand acres here and the Lake Elmo Airport sits inside the city, so a good deal of this ground is open with very little windbreak. Roofs on open ground take wind at full strength from any direction.
We fasten those roofs with six-nail patterns and high-wind-rated shingles rather than the four-nail minimum, and we pay attention to the rake and eave edges, which is where an exposed roof starts to lift before anything else goes.
Storm damage and the claim after it
Washington County takes its share of hail and wind. We inspect and photograph damage with a reference scale in frame, on the house and on the outbuildings, and write it up so an adjuster can act on it. If a claim is already open we will meet the adjuster at the property. Our storm damage and insurance claims pages cover the process.
Call 612-235-8696 for an inspection, or use the contact page with the address and the best way down the drive. We also work north of here in Dellwood and west in Shoreview, and the full list of cities is on the service areas page.