Roof Repair in Davenport and the Quad Cities

People call about a repair when they see a stain. By then water has already been in the house for a while, because it takes time to soak through insulation and drywall. The job is to find where it entered, which is almost never directly above where it showed up.

Where Leaks Actually Start

After enough roofs you stop guessing. The order below is roughly how often each one turns out to be the cause on a house in this area.

1. Step flashing where a roof meets a wall, usually beside a dormer
2. Chimney flashing and the counter flashing cut into the brick
3. Pipe boots, where the rubber collar around a vent pipe has split
4. Valleys, where two roof planes dump water into one channel
5. Nail pops, where a fastener has backed out and lifted a shingle
6. Ice dam damage at the eaves, showing up months after winter
7. Actual missing or broken shingles, which is the rarest of these

A pipe boot is a ten dollar part that fails around year twelve and floods a ceiling. Roofers see it constantly. Homeowners almost never do, because it sits flat and looks fine from the ground.

Water Travels Before It Drips

Water that gets past the shingles runs down the underside of the deck, along a rafter, across a ceiling joist and drops wherever it finds a seam. A stain in the middle of the living room can come from a leak twelve feet away and six feet higher.

This is why we do not patch where the stain is. We go into the attic when we can, follow the track back uphill, and find the entry point. A repair aimed at the stain is a repair that fails in the next hard rain.

What We Hand You Afterward

Every repair comes back with photos. One of the cause, close enough to see the failure. One of the repair finished. If we found something else while we were up there, that gets a photo too, with a note about whether it needs doing now or can wait a season.

Roof Repair on Older Davenport Homes

Davenport has an old housing stock. The Census puts the median home in the city at 1966, and about one in four homes was built before 1940. Older houses tend to carry more of the places where leaks start. More chimneys, more dormers, more walls the roof runs into, and more layers of past repairs to sort through.

That changes how we look at a leak here. We check the flashing at every chimney and wall first, then the pipe boots, then the shingles. You can see how old the homes are on your street in the roof age map of the Quad Cities, and read more about your town on the Davenport roofing page.

If water is coming in right now, that is a different call. Our emergency roof repair visit stops the water first and the real repair follows on a dry day.

When We Tell You Not to Repair It

A repair on a roof with five good years left is money well spent. The same repair on a twenty five year old roof buys a season and makes the eventual tear off no cheaper.

We will say so. A patch that holds until the roof is replaced anyway is sometimes exactly right, and we will do that too, as long as you know that is what you are buying. The honest version of this decision lives in Repair or Replace.

Questions About Roof Repair