Roof Repair and Leak Tracing

Water gets in somewhere high and shows up somewhere low. Sometimes several metres away, having run quietly along a rafter the whole distance.

So the stain on your ceiling is where the water finally gave up. It is not where it got in, and quoting a repair from the stain is guessing with a ladder.

It is usually the flashing

The open field of shingles — the big plain area everyone pictures when they think "roof" — is generally the part still doing its job perfectly well. The failures happen at the interruptions.

A chimney. A valley where two planes meet. A skylight. The step flashing tucked behind a dormer or a rear addition. And the plumbing stack boot, which deserves its own paragraph.

The stack boot, which is the answer more often than you would think

It is a rubber collar around a plumbing vent pipe, sitting in full sun for two decades. Eventually it splits. Water runs down the outside of the pipe, into the attic, and the stain turns up a metre away looking like something far more serious.

Cheap part. Short job. A genuinely large share of the calls in this trade, and one of the more satisfying phone calls to make — no, you do not need a roof, you need a forty-dollar boot and an hour of somebody's time.

Repair, or replace

A roof with ten good years in it and one failed boot needs a boot. Easy.

A roof at twenty-two years, with shingles curling at the edges, granules collecting in the eavestrough and a third leak since spring, is being repaired past the point where repairing is the cheaper option. That is a harder conversation and we would rather have it honestly than sell you a fourth repair.

What decides it is the deck and the age, not the leak. Either way you get the findings in writing — including when the finding is that the roof is fine and your water is coming from somewhere else entirely, which happens more often than you would expect.