Your Home’s Roof and Siding Take The Brunt of The Elements

Your home’s roof and siding take the brunt of the elements. And, because these components of the home are constantly battered by wind, rain, snow, and hail, you will need to replace them, or at least fix them. Roof replacement happens. Especially here in Billings, Montana where the summer storms can drop great quantities of large-sized hail onto our roofs, weakening it to the point of replacement. But how do you know if your roof needs to be replaced? There’s the obvious—call a roofing contractor post-storm for an inspection—but there’s a few things that you can do, on your own, to determine if your roof needs to be replaced.

For starters, any home with an asphalt shingled roof should have the shingles replaced after twenty years. If your roof is considerably younger, inspect it. There’s the option to go up onto the roof from a ladder to inspect the shingles, but this isn’t always safe nor practical. You can get the same idea of the condition of the roof, when you stand back from the home and look at the shingles through binoculars. You’re looking for anywhere that shingles are peeling-upward, maybe some have big fissure-like cracks through them, or maybe there’s complete sections of shingles missing—if this is the case, don’t hesitate to call a contractor, a leaky roof can cause a lot of damage if left unchecked.

Another area to check for roof-wear is in the attic. When the sun is bright, go up into the attic and turn off every light. Inspect the underside of the roof at the areas of the chimney stack or the stack vent—any place where there is flashing installed to seal out the elements under the shingles. If there’s light passing through anywhere near the flashing, even tiny, pin-holes, the flashing probably needs replacement and you’ll probably need a large-scale repair, or possibly even a replacement.

If you find that there’s significant damage to the roof, call your roofing contractor. Lynnrich carries quality products such as Highlander laminate shingles, which offer not only great protection, but also a uniquely dimensional appearance to the roof when installed.