What that stain on your ceiling probably means
Water almost never comes in where it shows up. It runs along the sheathing or down a rafter and drops at the first low point it finds, so the spot on your ceiling is a clue rather than an address. Here is what the common ones usually turn out to be.
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A stain that grows with every rain
Worth a call the same night, though not for the reason most people fear.
Something is open, and the water has found a path it will use every time it rains. The ceiling is not about to come down.
Why this happens
Most often it is the neoprene collar around a plumbing vent, which goes brittle and splits somewhere past its tenth winter, or a seam that has let go on a low-slope roof. What makes it worth the same night is the insulation above the ceiling: it is soaked, and wet insulation stops working and stays wet.
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A round stain next to the chimney
This week is soon enough.
Almost always the flashing rather than the roof. The shingles can be in perfect shape and it will still leak.
Why this happens
The counterflashing works its way out of the mortar joint over the years, or the chimney was never given a cricket behind it, so water sits against the brick instead of running around it. What quietly rots while it waits is the framing inside the chase.
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A dark line along the eave
No rush for the ceiling. The part that is rotting is the part you cannot see.
Usually the gutter rather than the roof. It fills with needles and fog-belt debris, backs up past the drip edge and runs behind it.
Why this happens
Plenty of older houses in Berkeley and Alameda never got a drip edge at all. The water reaches the fascia and the rafter tails first, and those are cheap to deal with now and expensive to deal with in five years.
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Stains in more than one room
No rush at all, and possibly nothing to repair.
This is rarely four separate leaks. It is usually one roof at the end of its life, or it is not a leak at all.
Why this happens
Composition curls and sheds its granules across the whole field somewhere past its twentieth year, and once that starts it shows up in several rooms at once. The other possibility is condensation: an unvented attic in the fog belt collects warm indoor air, condenses it on the cold underside of the deck and rains it back down. Worth having someone put a head in the attic before anyone quotes you a roof.
What we get called out for
Four kinds of work, and they are not the same size. Nearly all of it starts with the same call, and where it goes from there depends on whether one detail failed or the whole surface did.
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Leak repair
We find where the water is actually getting in rather than where it shows, tarp it if the rain is not finished, and do the repair once the roof is dry enough for anything to bond to it. Most of them come down to one flashing, one pipe boot or one seam.
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Roof replacement
For when the whole surface has worn out rather than one detail failing. We strip the old roof down to the bare wood, replace anything rotten underneath, and build back with materials chosen for where the house stands. In the Oakland hills that means a Class A fire rating, required up there since the 1991 fire. On a flat roof in the Sunset it means something else entirely.
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Roof inspection
A written condition report: slope, squares, how many layers are up there, the state of the deck and what is left of the service life. Worth having before you buy a house, and before you accept anyone's estimate.
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Gutters and downspouts
Cleaning, repair and replacement, along with the drip edge underneath them that turns out to be the real problem more often than the gutter does.
How a leak call actually goes
Four steps, in this order, because each one depends on the one before it. The middle two are what most people have not been told: a tarp is not a repair, and a price without a written scope is not an estimate.
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You call
The phone is answered through the night in the rainy season. The first questions are where the water is showing and when it started, which is usually enough to know whether this needs someone tonight or on Thursday.
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We tarp it, the same night if it needs it
A tarp is not a repair. It buys the ceiling a few dry days so the real work can happen properly instead of in the rain.
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You get the scope in writing before you get a number
How big the roof is, how many layers of old roofing are up there, what shape the wood underneath is in, how steep it is, and how we get a ladder and a truck to it. Those five things decide the price, and you should see them written down first.
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The work goes in the first dry window
Most roofing materials will not bond to a wet roof, so the repair waits for a break in the weather. Between November and March that is usually a matter of days rather than weeks. We watch the forecast and tell you when.
Where we work, and what the roofs are like there
The Bay Area does not have one kind of roof. What sits on a house in the Sunset has almost nothing in common with what sits on one in the Oakland hills, and neither one is repaired the same way.
- Sunset, Richmond and Parkside
- Flat roofs almost everywhere, tar-and-gravel over the older ones, and north slopes that hold moss all the way through the fog months.
- Mission, Bernal Heights and Noe Valley
- Pre-war houses with asphalt shingle laid over spaced boards rather than solid wood, and awkward valleys where an addition meets the original roof.
- Montclair, Rockridge and Piedmont Pines
- Class A fire rating required since the 1991 Tunnel Fire, which also means a wood shake roof cannot be replaced with another one.
- Elmwood, North Berkeley and Westbrae
- Bungalows with deep eaves, where rot in the exposed rafter ends is as common as anything actually wrong with the roof.
- The East End, West End and Gold Coast
- Victorians with complicated valleys and ornamental ridges, often with original metal work worth keeping rather than replacing.
Recent work
The same roof before and after, photographed from the same place. Each one lists the neighborhood, the month, how big it was and what we did to it.
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Before After - Neighborhood
- Month
- Size
- Work done
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Before After - Neighborhood
- Month
- Size
- Work done
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Before After - Neighborhood
- Month
- Size
- Work done
What decides what a roof costs
A roof does not have a price the way an appliance does. Two houses on the same block, needing the same work, can land a long way apart, and the difference is almost always one of five things.
How much roof there is. Measured in squares, and a square is a hundred square feet. It is the only one of the five you can guess at from the ground.
How many layers are already up there. One layer comes off quickly. Three layers is three times the stripping and three times the dump fees, and you cannot tell from the street.
What the wood underneath is like. Nobody knows this until the old roofing is off. A straight estimate says in advance what happens if the wood is soft and what that costs, so it is not a conversation you have on the day.
How steep it is. Past about six inches of rise for every foot across, the crew works roped on and everything takes longer.
How we get to it. A truck that parks under the eave is a different job from carrying every bundle through a back garden in the Mission.
The visit is free, and it stays free whether or not you hire us. It takes half an hour to an hour depending on how much roof there is. You do not have to be home, as long as we can reach the roof and the attic hatch. And you get the written scope before you get a number — the number references it line by line.
Start with a call
The fastest way through this is the phone. Calls are answered around the clock through the rainy season, and the first two questions take about a minute.
Or send this instead
On this demonstration site the form does not send. It is wired to the contractor’s own inbox at handover.