There's a stain on the ceiling and it's getting bigger. Maybe it only shows up after a real rain. Maybe it's been there since the last atmospheric river and you've been hoping it would dry out on its own. It won't. Water that has reached your drywall has already been inside the roof assembly for a while.
We find where the water is actually getting in, which is almost never where the stain is. Water travels. It runs down the underside of the sheathing, follows a rafter, wicks along a nail line, and drops through the first opening it finds. Chase the stain and you patch the wrong three feet of roof.
Chimneys, skylights, wall abutments, pipe collars. Most leaks we find are at a transition, not out in the open field of the roof.
One tile shifts in a Santa Ana and water starts hitting felt that was never meant to see sun.
Wind gets under a course, breaks the seal strip, and the tab stops laying flat. It can look normal from the driveway and leak every storm. Where we replace shingles, we build with Owens Corning Duration.
Valley metal carries more water than anywhere else on the roof. Old mastic patches shrink and crack, and the penetrations they were covering start letting go.
Diagnosis comes first. Where there's attic access, we read the framing and sheathing from underneath (staining, rust trails on nail shanks, daylight) because the underside tells you where the water actually landed and which way it ran. Then we work the roof above it. When it isn't obvious, water testing sorts it out: wet one small area at a time, low to high, and wait. You shouldn't have to take anyone's word for what's happening on a roof you can't see.
A repair is the right call when the failure is local and the rest of the roof still has life in it: one bad piece of flashing, a length of valley, a dozen slipped tiles. That's most of what we do. Where we'll tell you to stop spending money is when the underlayment has gone brittle across the whole roof. Patch one leak there and the next one shows up somewhere else the following winter. When that's what we're looking at, we'll say so.
Almost never. Water gets in somewhere higher, travels along framing or sheathing, and drops at the first opening it reaches: a can light, a seam, a nail. That's why we inspect from the attic and the roof instead of guessing from the ceiling.
Yes. Emergency tarping keeps water out while the weather is bad or while you're deciding on the repair. It's a stopgap, not a fix, and we won't sell it as one.
Yes. A leak that only shows up in hard, wind-driven rain usually means a flashing or a seal that's failing but hasn't fully gone yet. It's easier and less disruptive to deal with while it's still intermittent.
We'll come out, get on the roof, and put it in writing. Free inspection across LA and the Inland Empire.
