Twenty minutes twice a year will add years to your roof. Here is exactly what to check each spring and each fall, and what to leave to a contractor.
Roofs almost never fail suddenly. They fail slowly, in a place nobody looked, and then announce themselves as a stain on a ceiling. Two short inspections a year catches most of it.
Every spring
Walk the perimeter of the house and look up. You are checking for shingles that have lifted, slipped or gone missing over winter, and for any section of the roof line that no longer looks straight.
Clean the gutters properly and run water through them. A gutter that overflows at one corner is telling you where an ice dam formed and where water has been getting behind the fascia.
Check the valleys. Debris in a valley dams water and forces it sideways under the shingles — this is a leading cause of leaks that appear nowhere near the actual entry point.
Look at the flashing around chimneys, vent pipes and any roof-to-wall transition. Sealant fails long before the metal does, and cracked sealant at a pipe boot is one of the cheapest fixes in roofing.
Every fall
Clean the gutters again after the leaves have finished dropping. Doing it once, in October, before everything is down, is a wasted afternoon.
Trim back branches that overhang the roof. Branches abrade shingles in the wind, drop debris into valleys, and give squirrels a bridge to your soffit.
Get into the attic with a flashlight on a bright day. You are looking for daylight at the eaves, dark staining on the underside of the deck, damp or compressed insulation, and any smell of must. Attic moisture in autumn becomes an ice dam in January.
Confirm your soffit vents are not blocked by insulation. This is extremely common after any attic insulation top-up, and it stops your ventilation dead.
After any significant storm
Look for granules washed into gutter outlets or at the base of downspouts, for shingle debris in the yard, and for dents on soft metal like gutters, vents and any AC condenser fins — hail that dents an aluminum vent has bruised your shingles too, even if you cannot see it from the ground.
What to leave to a contractor
Anything requiring you to be on the roof. Steep slopes, wet or frosted surfaces, and anything above single-storey height are not worth the risk, and a fall is a far more expensive outcome than a repair.
We inspect roofs free of charge and provide photographs of anything we find. If you would rather not go up, call (812) 259-0159 and we will do the twenty-minute check for you.