Roof inspection
An inspection is worth its cost when it answers a decision you are about to make: buying a house, planning next season’s budget, or deciding whether an ageing covering has another few years in it. On housing where whole streets share a roof age, one inspection often tells you what the next five years will ask of you.
When it earns its price
Three moments justify the cost here. Before a purchase — a roof at the end of its life changes what a house is worth, and this region’s stock makes age easy to misjudge from the street. After a hard winter — freeze-thaw works slowly and invisibly, and the right time to look is right after the last freeze, before spring bookings fill. And near the end of a covering’s life — when the real question is “this year or in three years,” a documented answer beats a guess in either direction, because replacing early wastes remaining life and replacing late buys interior damage.
What gets checked
On the surface: granule loss across the field, with special attention to south-facing slopes where the sun works hardest; the condition of edges, ridge caps and valleys; sealant and flashing at every chimney, wall and vent penetration — the transitions where roofs actually give out; and the rubber boots at plumbing vents, which the altitude sun cracks years before the shingles around them fail.
On the attic side, which a street-level look can never replace: ventilation (a starved attic cooks the covering from below in summer and feeds ice damming at the eaves in winter), signs of moisture on the underside of the decking, and daylight where there should be none. A report that skips the attic is half a report.
What the report is good for
A written report with photographs does three jobs. It turns a purchase negotiation from opinion into evidence. It converts “sometime soon” into a plan with a season attached — which is what lets you gather quotes unhurried, in late winter, instead of urgently in July. And when replacement is the verdict, it becomes the scope document that makes three bids comparable, because every bidder is pricing the same documented findings rather than their own quick look.