Roof Repair in Sterling Heights, MI

A missing shingle exposes the nail heads of the course below and leaves the underlayment open to sun and rain. The fix is to break the seal on the courses above, pull the nails holding the damaged pieces, slide new shingles in and nail them with four nails each, the code minimum for strip shingles, then hand-seal the tabs. The hard part on a roof more than a few years old is color, because granules fade. Ask whether the roofer has a close match before agreeing to a patch on the slope that faces the street. HomeGuide puts replacing up to 25 shingles at $100 to $300. Wind ratings, and why some shingles keep their tabs better than others, are on the shingle roofing page.

A nail pop is a roofing nail that has worked its way back out of the deck and pushed up the shingle above it, sometimes far enough to poke through. From the ground it looks like a small bump in an otherwise flat row. Nails that missed solid wood, nails driven at an angle and deck boards that swell and shrink with attic moisture are the usual causes. The repair is to pull the nail, drive a new one beside it into solid wood, seal the old hole and re-seal the tab. Unsealed tabs are the related problem: the factory sealant strip never bonded, or has let go, and the tab flaps until it creases. The Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association says sealing depends on slope, orientation and sun, so a north slope shingled late in the fall may not seal until spring.

Ridges and hips take wind from both sides, and the cap shingles there are bent over the peak, which is why they are often the first to crack on an aging roof. Where the ridge has a vent, the caps also hold the vent down, so one missing cap can let rain and blown snow straight into the attic through the vent slot. The repair is new cap pieces, each lapped over the last and nailed through the vent into the deck. ARMA warns that hip and ridge shingles can crack when bent in cold weather, so in winter a careful roofer warms the caps first or waits for a milder day.

Wind gets under a roof at its edges first. Along the rakes (the sloped gable ends) and the eaves, a starter course with its own sealant line holds the first shingles down. If the starter was left out, nailed too high or put on as upside-down 3-tab strips, the edge shingles peel back in a strong gust and take the next courses with them. The repair resets the edge shingles over a proper starter strip, hand-seals them and checks that the metal edge underneath is still fastened. Some older roofs were finished with the shingles simply nailed over the wood rake board, with no metal edge at all. If yours is one, ask for a drip edge price on the same visit (drip edge rules).

Plastic box vents and bathroom or kitchen exhaust hoods turn brittle after years of sun and cold, and hail can punch through them. A cracked hood lets rain run straight down the duct and onto the ceiling below. The repair is a new hood flashed into the roof, with the upper shingle courses lapped over its top flange and its bottom flange left over the shingles below. HomeGuide prices vent replacement at $200 to $700 and $75 to $150 for fixing a vent boot. If the bath fan duct turns out to end in the attic instead of at the hood, have it reconnected at the same visit. Warm, damp air dumped into a cold attic ends up as frost on the underside of the deck.