Roof repair in Alpharetta

Match the symptom to the cause

Alpharetta roofs are steep, cut-up and mostly 15 to 25 years old, so the same handful of failures come up over and over. Here is what the thing you noticed usually means.

The full price list is on the pricing page. If a limb came down with the shingles, skip this page and go to storm damage.

Why boots and flashing, not shingles

A shingle field on a 1990s Windward or Glen Abbey home rarely leaks in the middle. It leaks at the interruptions. A 3,000 sq ft house here has six or eight plumbing vents, a brick chimney, dormers, four valleys and often a skylight. Each is a hole sealed once, in 1997 or 2004, with a rubber collar, a bead of caulk, or aluminum tucked against brick. North Georgia sun cooks rubber and caulk in about a decade; the shingles around them are usually fine.

That is why we open the attic hatch before we quote. The stain on your ceiling is where water landed after running down a rafter; the entry point is uphill from it, sometimes ten feet uphill. Guessing from the ground is how a roof gets "repaired" three times for the same leak.

Two Alpharetta-specific leaks

Stucco kick-out flashing. A lot of the hardcoat-stucco homes off Kimball Bridge and in Johns Creek were built without a kick-out at the bottom of the wall where it meets a lower roof. Water runs down inside the stucco for years and shows up as a rotted band of sheathing at the corner. The fix is a kick-out and a section of new step flashing, and the earlier it is done the less wall there is to open.

Valleys under pine needles. Loblolly needles pile in valleys and hold moisture against the shingles from October to April. Shingle roof repair Alpharetta crews do in valleys is a re-lay: strip the valley, ice-and-water membrane, new shingles woven or cut, and the needles blown out of the gutter while we are up there.

How the visit goes

1. Attic first, with a flashlight, tracing water marks on the underside of the decking to their highest point.
2. Then the roof, checking every penetration within a few feet of that point and lifting shingles to see if the seal strips still hold.
3. If nothing is obvious, one of us runs a hose on one section at a time while the other watches from inside. It takes half an hour and finds nearly everything.
4. Photos of the problem, a written price, and if you say yes we usually finish the repair the same trip.

If you want to look before you call, our post on finding a roof leak from inside shows what the trails look like.

When we say replace instead

Roof repair Alpharetta GA homeowners ask for is worth doing on a roof with years left. It is not worth doing on one that is finished. We tell you which one you have. Bald patches on the south slope, granules an inch deep in the gutters, shingles that crack when lifted, or soft decking in two different places all mean a repair is a season of borrowed time. The roof replacement page covers what comes next, and the post on repair versus replacement puts numbers on the decision.

Gutters and fascia

Gutter and roof repair Alpharetta homeowners book together for a reason. A gutter overflowing behind a wall of pine needles rots the fascia and the first course of decking above it. We replace decking at $90–$150 per sheet, rebuild the fascia, and re-hang the gutter so the repair holds. Black streaks on a north slope are algae, not a leak; a soft wash removes them.

Where we go

Windward, Glen Abbey, Downtown, Crabapple, the Kimball Bridge, Webb Bridge and Haynes Bridge neighborhoods, plus Milton, Johns Creek, Roswell, Cumming, Suwanee and Duluth. Skylight leak repair Alpharetta wide and chimney flashing repair Alpharetta homes need are the two jobs we drive furthest for.