Roofing in Malcolm

A wooded lot is a different roof

Malcolm and the properties around it carry a lot of mature tree cover, and that changes the list of things that go wrong. On an open subdivision street the enemies are wind and hail. In shade the enemies are slower and quieter, and they are usually mistaken for age.

Shade keeps a roof damp. A slope that never gets a couple of hours of direct sun holds water after rain and snowmelt far longer than the one opposite it, and that is enough to change how the surface ages. Algae is the visible result, dark streaking running down the slope, and it is cosmetic. Moss is the one that matters, because it is a plant with a root hold: it keeps water against the surface, and as the cushion thickens it works under the bottom edge of the courses above it.

Cleaning treats the symptom and it comes back. Getting light and air onto the slope treats the cause.

What the limbs do

A branch resting on or sweeping across a roof does two things, both slow. It scours granules off in one patch with every wind, and it keeps that patch wet. Years later you have a bare area in the middle of an otherwise sound roof, and the honest description of it is wear, which means it is yours to pay for rather than the insurer's.

Debris is the other half of it. Leaves and needles collect where slopes meet, and a valley is the single highest volume path on any roof. An obstruction there backs water up sideways under the courses either side, which is a leak in a place with no obvious cause above it. Clearing valleys is unglamorous and it is the highest return half hour on a wooded property.

The buildings behind the house

Like the rest of this part of the county, most acreage properties here have more than the one roof. Shops, machine sheds and covers are almost all exposed fastener metal, and the failure point on those is the washer under each screw rather than the panel itself. Once the washers harden and shrink, every fastener is an entry point and the building leaks everywhere at once while looking fine.

A rescrew with larger screws and fresh washers across the whole roof is the answer, and it is a day's work rather than a replacement.

When a storm does come through

The trees cut both ways. They take some of the force out of the wind, which genuinely helps the house, and then they drop limbs on it, which does not. After any serious blow the thing worth doing is walking the property before anybody else does: photograph the roof from the ground on every side, photograph the soft metal, and photograph whatever came out of the trees and where it landed.

Then read how the spring storms damage a roof, because telling hail bruising from wind uplift decides whether there is a claim worth opening at all. If the problem turns out to be ice at the eaves in February instead, that is a house problem rather than a weather one and the answer is different.