April Showers are Coming! Is Your Roof Ready?

Spring is the busiest part of the year for roofs in North Texas, and it rarely gives much notice. A line of storms can cross the Metroplex in under an hour and leave behind hail bruising, lifted shingles and a slow leak that will not show itself on your ceiling until the following month. The roofs that come through it best are the ones that were already in reasonable shape before April arrived.

Here is what is worth looking at now, and what to do if a storm has already been through.

Start from the ground

You do not need to get on the roof, and we would rather you did not. Most of what matters can be seen from the driveway with a phone camera zoomed in.

Walk the perimeter of the house and look for shingles that are curling at the edges, sitting proud of the course below, or missing outright. Look along the ridge line — it should read as a straight edge. A ridge that dips or waves usually means something underneath it has moved. Check the metal around anything that penetrates the roof: vents, the chimney, and the flashing where a lower roof meets a wall. That flashing is where a surprising share of leaks actually begin.

Then look in your gutters. Loose granules collecting in them, like coarse sand, mean the shingle surface is wearing through, and a roof shedding granules has less protection against the next round of hail.

Inside the house

Go up into the attic on a bright day and turn your torch off. Daylight coming through anywhere it should not is a hole. While you are up there, look for dark staining on the underside of the decking and for insulation that is matted or damp — both indicate water has been getting in, whether or not it has reached a ceiling yet.

Blocked ventilation matters more here than most homeowners expect. A poorly ventilated attic runs hot and holds moisture, and that shortens the life of the shingles above it from underneath. If the attic feels like an oven and smells damp, the roof is aging faster than it needs to.

After a storm has been through

Two things are worth doing straight away, and one is worth avoiding.

Photograph everything before anything is moved or cleaned up, including the debris on the ground and any dents in soft metal — gutters, downspouts, vent caps and the top of an air conditioning unit. Soft metal takes a clear impression from hail and is often the easiest way to establish that hail of a given size actually fell on your property. Those photographs are the record, and they are much harder to reconstruct later.

If water is actively coming in, get the roof covered. Emergency tarping stops the damage spreading into decking, insulation and drywall while the rest is sorted out.

What we would avoid is signing anything with whoever knocks on the door first. Storms draw crews into the Metroplex from well outside it, and the ones worth using are still answering the phone a year later.

When to call somebody

If you found any of the above — granules in the gutters, a wavy ridge, daylight in the attic, dents in soft metal after a storm — it is worth having someone look properly. Our inspections are free, we photograph what we find, and you get a written assessment of it whether or not there is work to do. If the answer is that your roof is fine for another few years, that is a perfectly good outcome and we will tell you so.

Call (817) 754-9484, or request a free inspection and we will come out.

You may also find these useful: storm damage covers what the repair process looks like, and insurance claims explains how we handle the paperwork side.