Roof Repair in Kansas City

The most common thing we hear on a repair call is that the roof has already been repaired, once or twice, and it still leaks. Almost always the reason is the same: the previous repair was made where the water showed up, not where it came in.

Water entering a roof rarely falls straight down. It runs along the top of the decking until it finds a seam, then along a rafter, then across the ceiling drywall, and it emerges wherever gravity and framing send it. A stain in the middle of a bedroom ceiling can easily originate from a failed flashing eight feet away and four feet higher.

Patching the roof directly above the stain therefore fixes nothing, and the homeowner concludes that roofers cannot find leaks. What is actually needed is a two-sided inspection: the roof surface from above and the underside of the decking from the attic. Water leaves a visible trail on the underside of decking, and that trail leads back to the hole.

Pipe boots. The rubber collar around a plumbing vent degrades in UV and splits, usually somewhere between twelve and twenty years. It is a cheap part causing an expensive interior repair, and on a roof of a certain age they are all failing at once.

Step and kickout flashing. Where a roof meets a wall, water has to be handled by metal woven into the shingle courses, with a kickout at the bottom to throw water into the gutter. Missing kickouts send water behind siding for years with no ceiling stain at all.

Wind-lifted shingles. A shingle whose sealant strip has been broken by wind will not reseal reliably. It may still be lying flat and still be compromised.

Nail pops. A fastener backing out of the decking pushes a hole through the shingle above it. Easy to fix, easy to miss.

Valley metal. Valleys carry the most concentrated water on any roof, and deteriorated or improperly lapped valley metal leaks under volume even when it looks intact.

A repair is the correct answer when the roof has genuine life left and the failure is localized. If your shingles are still flexible, the granule coverage is good, and one flashing detail has failed, repairing it is honest work and we would rather do that than sell you a replacement.

A repair is the wrong answer when the shingles have gone brittle. If a shingle cracks when it is lifted, the roof cannot be worked on without creating new damage, and every repair becomes a new leak. At that point patching is spending money to postpone a decision.

We will show you photographs of what we find and tell you which situation your roof is in. Sometimes the answer is a two hundred dollar fix. We say that just as plainly as we say the other thing.

Every roof leak repair starts in two places at once. Outside, we check the details uphill of the stain: pipe boots, flashing, valleys and any shingles that have lifted. Inside, we go into the attic and follow the trail the water leaves on the underside of the decking and along the rafters back to where it came through.

When the two match up we know we have found it. When they do not, we keep looking. A repair made on a guess is the reason so many Kansas City homeowners pay for the same leak twice.

Many Kansas City homes have a low-slope section somewhere: a porch roof, a rear addition, a garage, a dormer. Those areas are covered in membrane or roll roofing rather than shingles and fail differently, usually at seams, at the transition where they meet the shingled roof, and anywhere water ponds.

We repair low-slope sections with materials made for low slope, not by spreading roof cement across the problem. Our flat roof repair page covers it in more detail.

High wind breaks the seal strip that holds each shingle down, and a shingle that has been flexed can crack along the nail line even if it is still lying flat. We replace damaged shingles one by one, hand-seal them when it is too cold for the strip to bond on its own, and check the neighboring courses that took the same wind.

We repair roofs in Kansas City on both sides of the state line. Call 816-572-9500 on the Missouri side or 913-281-6000 on the Kansas side. A live person answers 24/7, and our office is at 7440 NW River Park Drive in Parkville.