Roof Repair in Oshkosh, WI

Water rarely enters a roof where you see it come through the ceiling. It gets in at a joint, runs along a rafter, and drops somewhere else entirely. A repair that starts from the stain on the drywall usually fixes nothing.

The failures we find most often here are pipe boots that have gone brittle and split, step flashing where a roof meets a sidewall, valleys that were never lined properly, and chimney counter-flashing that was caulked instead of cut into the mortar. All four are fixable without touching the rest of your roof.

In January and February a lot of what looks like a roof leak in this region is an ice dam. Warm air escaping into the attic melts snow at the top of the roof, the meltwater runs down to the cold overhang and refreezes, and the ridge of ice that builds up there backs water uphill under the shingles.

Sealing the roof harder does not fix that. The repair is some combination of ice and water shield at the eave, air sealing the attic floor, and getting real intake ventilation into the soffits. If we find an ice dam problem we will tell you which of those you need rather than sell you all three.

Open exposure across the lake and the farmland west of it puts real wind on these roofs. Shingles lift, the seal strip lets go, and the tabs either tear off or stay up and let water under them. If it is a handful of shingles on an otherwise healthy roof, that is a straightforward repair. Matching the color to a weathered roof is the harder part, and we will tell you up front how close you will get.

If your shingles are curling at the corners across whole slopes, if the granules are coming off in handfuls, or if you have had leaks in three different places in two years, patching is throwing money at a roof that has reached the end. We would rather tell you that and let you plan a replacement than take the repair money twice.