Free Roof Inspections From Bellwood Roofers

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Recent Bellwood Roofing Projects

5 before-and-after projects documented for the homeowner and the homeowners insurance carrier.

The Photographs You Get Afterward

Every inspection produces a photo set, and it belongs to you whether or not you ever hire us. The reason is simple. Almost nobody can get up on their own roof to check the work of the person telling them they need a new one, so the pictures replace trust with evidence you can look at yourself and show to anyone else you want.

The set comes to you organized instead of dumped into one folder. There are wide shots of each slope so you can see the overall condition and where each close-up came from, then the details themselves: a lifted tab with a hand under it, a split collar around a stack, granule loss where a downspout empties onto a lower roof, flashing that has pulled loose from a wall.

Attic images come last, showing the underside of the sheathing, any staining, and where the bath fans terminate. If a slope is too steep to walk, we say which images came from the edge or from a pole instead of presenting them as though somebody stood there.

We label them so they mean something a week later. A close-up of dark speckling on a shingle is meaningless on its own; captioned as impact bruising on the west slope with the granules displaced, it becomes something you can compare against another opinion. If we think a photo shows normal aging rather than damage, we say that too, because half of an honest inspection is ruling things out.

Keep the set even if you decide to wait. Roofs change slowly, and having a dated record of what your roof looked like this year makes the next look far more useful.

It also gives you a fair basis for comparing bids, since you can hand the same images to another company and see whether their read of the roof matches what you're being told. When two people looking at the same photographs describe the same conditions, you can stop worrying about whether you're being sold something and start thinking about the actual work.

Ice at the Eaves and Why It Forms

An ice dam looks like a weather problem and is almost always a house problem. Here's the sequence. Heat escaping from the living space warms the underside of the roof deck.

Snow on the warm part of the roof melts even though the air outside is well below freezing. That meltwater runs down the slope until it reaches the overhang, which has nothing warm underneath it, and there it refreezes. A ridge of ice builds up along the eave, and the water arriving behind it has nowhere to go but sideways and back up under the shingles.

Shingles are designed to shed water running downhill. They aren't designed to hold back standing water pushing uphill, so it finds the fastener holes and the laps and comes through into the soffit, the wall cavity, or a bedroom ceiling. By the time a stain appears inside, water has usually been sitting in the assembly for a while.

The fix is on the inside of the house more than the outside. Air sealing around can lights, the attic hatch, bath fans and the top plates of interior walls stops the warm air from reaching the deck. Insulation to a proper depth, kept out of the eave vents, holds the heat where you paid to put it.

Intake at the soffit and exhaust at the ridge flushes out whatever gets past. Get those right and the roof stays cold, the snow stays snow, and there's no dam to speak of.

On the roof side, a membrane at the eaves and up the valleys is the backup, and it is the reason the codes here call for it. It won't stop an ice dam from forming, but it will keep the water that backs up behind one from reaching the deck. When we quote a reroof on a house with a history of ice at the gutter line, we look at the attic first and price the membrane generously, because that combination is what actually ends the problem.

Vague Answers to Watch For in Bellwood

Most bad roofing jobs are visible in advance, in the way the questions get answered before anything is signed. The tell is seldom a wrong answer. It tends to be a smooth one that gets around the specifics.

If you ask who will be on your roof and hear that they use only the best crews, you have learned nothing at all. The useful follow up is whether those people are employees, how long the lead has been running work for this company, and whether he will be on your job the whole time or splitting days between two houses.

Ask about the deck and listen for we'll replace anything bad. That sentence has no price and no threshold in it. Ask what counts as bad, ask what a sheet costs, and ask whether the number of sheets included is written on the estimate.

Same with the phrase we handle everything with insurance. Nobody handles your claim for you, and a company that says otherwise is either overpromising or planning to do something you wouldn't want your name attached to.

Watch for warranty talk that never separates the material from the labor. When somebody says the roof is covered for decades, ask which part, by whom, and what makes the paper worthless. Most material coverage assumes the installation followed the printed instructions, which means a shortcut on your roof can quietly cancel the very thing you were sold on.

The last vague answer to push on is about surprises. We'll take care of you sounds reassuring and commits to nothing. What you want is a described process: work stops, photographs get taken, a price comes to you in writing, and nothing proceeds until you say so.

A contractor who has that process will describe it in the same words every time, because it's what they actually do out there every week. A contractor who doesn't have one will change the subject back to the price, and the price is the one part of the conversation you can count on to move later.

Comparing Two Bellwood Roofing Estimates

Put two bids side by side and the first thing to do is stop looking at the totals. Find the measured area on each.

If they differ meaningfully, one of them measured your roof and the other didn't, and no other comparison is worth making until you know which. Check the waste factor as well, since a cut-up roof needs a generous one and a bid that carries almost none is either working from a simple gable in someone's imagination or planning to run short.

Next, line up what's coming off. Both should state the number of layers being removed and both should include disposal. Then find the decking language.

You're looking for a rate and an included quantity in each. A bid that says decking replaced as needed has told you nothing, and the difference between the two totals may be sitting entirely in that sentence.

Work down through the assembly after that. Underlayment across the whole roof, membrane at the eaves and valleys, starter at eaves and rakes, the field material and its fastening pattern, hip and ridge, then every piece of flashing by location and whether it is new or reused.

Ventilation with intake and exhaust called out. Somewhere in there you'll usually find the real gap between two prices, and it's rarely in the shingle line that everyone shops.

Finally, compare the parts that aren't about the roof at all. Who is doing the work and whether they're employees, what the workmanship terms say and for how long, what the payment schedule looks like and whether anything is due up front, how change orders are handled, and whether a permit is included where your town requires one. When you have done all of that, the totals will make sense, and quite often the bid that looked expensive turns out to be the one that included what you were going to end up paying for anyway.

If you find a real gap and can't work out which bid has it right, take the question back to whoever wrote the cheaper one. How they handle it tells you as much as the answer does.

What We Read From the Curb in Bellwood

Plenty gets decided before the ladder ever comes off the truck. Standing at the end of the driveway, we sight down the ridge to see whether it runs straight or dips between rafters, then look across each plane for the waves that say a deck has taken on moisture.

Color tells us plenty as well. The slope facing the afternoon sun almost always looks older than the rest of the house, and a heavy wash of granules at the bottom of a downspout means the surface has been giving up its protection for a while.

Next comes a lap around the perimeter, which is where a surprising amount of the useful information lives. We check whether the gutters are pulling away from the fascia, whether the fascia itself has gone soft at the corners, and whether the soffit vents have been painted shut or packed full of insulation from the inside.

Ground conditions matter too. A spot along the foundation that stays wet long after everything else has dried out usually traces back to a roof or gutter problem instead of the grading.

On the roof we work slope by slope. Nail pops raise a shingle just enough to catch a fingernail as you pass a hand over it.

Seal strips that have released let tabs lift in wind that shouldn't be bothering them at all. We look hard at valley wear, at the rubber collars around plumbing stacks, and at the metal where the chimney comes through, since those pieces almost always fail well before the open field of the roof does.

The last stop is inside, up the attic ladder with a light. Pinholes of daylight at the deck seams, rust blooming on the underside of nail tips, and dark staining across the shaded slope all say the same thing in different ways.

We also follow the bath fans to see where they end up, because more of them than you would like dump warm wet air straight into the attic. By the time we come back down the picture is complete enough that we can tell you what your roof needs and, just as often, what it doesn't.

Where We Have Worked in Bellwood

Every neighborhood in and around Bellwood where we've done roofing work is listed here. Click through for what our crews learned on those roofs.

Where we respond near Bellwood

Indiana-licensed crews dispatched to Bellwood and the closest surrounding communities.