LEOMINSTER MA ROOFING COMPANY

Most leaks don’t start where the drip appears. Water travels. The first places we check are the usual suspects: the rubber boots around plumbing vents, the flashing around your chimney, and any spots where two roof planes meet. We look for popped nails and cracked shingles. It’s a process of elimination, and years of experience tells us where to look first.

Not always. If the rest of your roof is in decent shape, we can often replace the missing shingles and match the color pretty closely. We’ll give you an honest opinion. If a repair will safely get you a few more years, we’ll tell you. If it’s a sign of a bigger failure, we’ll show you why and explain your options.

It’s a three-part problem: heat loss from your house into your attic, poor insulation, and bad ventilation. Your warm attic melts the snow on the roof from the bottom up. That water runs down to the cold edge of your roof and refreezes, creating a dam. The water backs up behind it and gets under your shingles. It’s a huge issue in older homes that weren’t built with modern ventilation in mind.

Go outside and look. Are the edges of your shingles starting to curl up? Do you see dark patches or bald spots where the little colored granules have worn off? Check your gutters for a build-up of those granules—it looks like coarse black sand. These are all signs your roof is nearing the end of its life.

It could be both. Clogged gutters are the most common cause, and they can cause water to back up under the edge of your roof, rotting the wood. But it could also be that your roof is shedding granules and debris that are clogging the gutters, or that the roof pitch sends water into them too fast. We always check the whole system.

Those jobs are more complex. They often have very steep pitches, which requires extra safety staging. We almost always find multiple layers of old roofing that have to be stripped off down to the original wood deck. Then we have to inspect that wood for rot before we can even start building the new roof. It’s more labor-intensive, but it has to be done right.

We do it all the time. We document the damage with clear photos, meet the insurance adjuster on-site to point out what they might miss, and provide a detailed estimate in the format they require. Our goal is to make sure the insurance company has everything they need to approve the work your home is entitled to, without you having to play middleman.