Storm Damage Roof Repair in Burnettsville, IN

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Recent Burnettsville Roofing Projects

5 before-and-after projects documented for the homeowner and the homeowners insurance carrier.

Ice at the Eaves and Why It Forms

An ice dam looks like a weather problem and is almost always a house problem. Here's the sequence. Heat escaping from the living space warms the underside of the roof deck.

Snow on the warm part of the roof melts even though the air outside is well below freezing. That meltwater runs down the slope until it reaches the overhang, which has nothing warm underneath it, and there it refreezes. A ridge of ice builds up along the eave, and the water arriving behind it has nowhere to go but sideways and back up under the shingles.

Shingles are designed to shed water running downhill. They aren't designed to hold back standing water pushing uphill, so it finds the fastener holes and the laps and comes through into the soffit, the wall cavity, or a bedroom ceiling. By the time a stain appears inside, water has usually been sitting in the assembly for a while.

The fix is on the inside of the house more than the outside. Air sealing around can lights, the attic hatch, bath fans and the top plates of interior walls stops the warm air from reaching the deck. Insulation to a proper depth, kept out of the eave vents, holds the heat where you paid to put it.

Intake at the soffit and exhaust at the ridge flushes out whatever gets past. Get those right and the roof stays cold, the snow stays snow, and there's no dam to speak of.

On the roof side, a membrane at the eaves and up the valleys is the backup, and it is the reason the codes here call for it. It won't stop an ice dam from forming, but it will keep the water that backs up behind one from reaching the deck. When we quote a reroof on a house with a history of ice at the gutter line, we look at the attic first and price the membrane generously, because that combination is what actually ends the problem.

What You Can See and What You Can't in Burnettsville

From the ground you can pick up more than most people expect. Tabs that have begun to curl at the corners read as a slightly rough texture along the lower courses. Missing shingles are obvious enough.

Dark streaks running down a slope are usually algae rather than damage, common on the shaded side and mostly a cosmetic matter, though it does hold moisture against the surface longer than anyone would like. Washed out patches where the color has gone pale mean the granules have worn off, and once that layer is gone the sun starts working on the mat underneath.

What you can't see from down there's most of what actually matters. Fastener condition, whether the seal strips are still bonded, how much life is left in the flashing metal, and whether the deck has soft spots underfoot are all hands and knees findings.

A roof can look presentable from the street and still be a season or two from real trouble, and the reverse happens just as often. Plenty of roofs that look awful are simply dirty.

Then there's the part only the attic will show you. Moisture staining on the underside of the sheathing, rusted nail tips, insulation compressed flat at the eaves, and daylight where there should not be any all point to conditions that never announce themselves on the surface. Homeowners are frequently surprised that we spend as long inside as we do on top, but that's where a roof tells the truth about how it has been living.

So the honest answer to whether you need a new roof is that nobody can hand it to you from the sidewalk. Anyone quoting a replacement without going up and going in is reading from a script. When we finish, you get the photographs from all three vantage points along with a plain explanation of what each one means, whether that points toward a full replacement, a repair, or a note to look again in a season or two.

Measuring a Burnettsville Roof Before Pricing It

Pricing starts with area, and area on a roof is not the same as the footprint of the house. A steep roof covers considerably more surface than a shallow one over the same rooms, which is why two houses with identical square footage inside can need very different amounts of material. So the first thing that happens is a real measurement, plane by plane, either walked with a tape and a wheel or pulled from aerial imagery and then verified on site.

Pitch gets recorded for every slope, and it does two jobs in the estimate. It sets the area, and it sets the labor. A crew can move comfortably on a moderate pitch and work most of the day.

Past a certain steepness they need staging, roof jacks and harness anchors, everything gets carried up by hand instead of slid, and the same square of shingles takes considerably longer to install. That's not padding. It's the honest cost of working on a surface people cannot stand on.

Waste is the part homeowners rarely hear about. A simple gable roof wastes very little, because most bundles get installed whole.

A roof with several valleys, dormers and hips wastes a good deal more, since every shingle running into a valley or up a hip gets cut and the offcut usually goes in the dumpster. A fair estimate states the waste factor openly, and a cut-up roof will always carry a higher one.

The measurement also produces the counts everything else hangs on. Linear feet of eave and rake for the starter and the drip edge, linear feet of ridge and hip for the caps, linear feet of valley for the membrane, the number of penetrations needing new collars, and the length of every wall the roof runs into.

When those numbers appear on your estimate, you can check them against your own house. When they don't appear at all, you are being asked to trust a number nobody has shown their work for.

Vague Answers to Watch For in Burnettsville

Most bad roofing jobs are visible in advance, in the way the questions get answered before anything is signed. The tell is seldom a wrong answer. It tends to be a smooth one that gets around the specifics.

If you ask who will be on your roof and hear that they use only the best crews, you have learned nothing at all. The useful follow up is whether those people are employees, how long the lead has been running work for this company, and whether he will be on your job the whole time or splitting days between two houses.

Ask about the deck and listen for we'll replace anything bad. That sentence has no price and no threshold in it. Ask what counts as bad, ask what a sheet costs, and ask whether the number of sheets included is written on the estimate.

Same with the phrase we handle everything with insurance. Nobody handles your claim for you, and a company that says otherwise is either overpromising or planning to do something you wouldn't want your name attached to.

Watch for warranty talk that never separates the material from the labor. When somebody says the roof is covered for decades, ask which part, by whom, and what makes the paper worthless. Most material coverage assumes the installation followed the printed instructions, which means a shortcut on your roof can quietly cancel the very thing you were sold on.

The last vague answer to push on is about surprises. We'll take care of you sounds reassuring and commits to nothing. What you want is a described process: work stops, photographs get taken, a price comes to you in writing, and nothing proceeds until you say so.

A contractor who has that process will describe it in the same words every time, because it's what they actually do out there every week. A contractor who doesn't have one will change the subject back to the price, and the price is the one part of the conversation you can count on to move later.

What the Written Estimate Actually Says

A number spoken in your driveway is worth nothing. What you should end up holding is a document that describes the job well enough that a different crew could pick it up and build the same roof. Ours starts with the measurement, the slopes and their pitches, and the total area in squares, so you can see that the price is tied to something countable instead of to a guess about your house.

Under that come the line items in the order the work happens. Tear-off and how many layers are coming off, disposal, the decking allowance with a rate per board or sheet and a quantity included, the underlayment, the ice and water membrane at the eaves and in the valleys, starter along the rakes and eaves, the field material, hip and ridge, and every piece of flashing by location. Ventilation appears on its own line with the intake and exhaust listed separately, because that's a decision you should get to make on purpose.

The parts that aren't included matter just as much. Our exclusions are written out where you can see them, along with the specific conditions that would trigger a change order and how you would be notified. Any change gets photographed, priced, and approved by you in writing before the work happens, so the last day of the job holds no surprises.

The back page covers the ordinary business items. How the payment schedule works and what's due when, roughly how long the job takes on a house like yours, who is responsible for the permit if your town requires one, what the workmanship coverage includes and for how long, and how that differs from the material coverage that comes from whoever made the shingles.

Read that page carefully, because it's where most of the disputes we hear about would have been prevented. If anything in it is unclear, ask, and if the answer you get is vague, ask again until it's written down in words you would be comfortable reading back to somebody a year from now.

Working Burnettsville Street by Street

We've roofed homes throughout Burnettsville and the surrounding communities. Select any neighborhood to read what working there has taught us.

Where we respond near Burnettsville

Indiana-licensed crews dispatched to Burnettsville and the closest surrounding communities.