Should I try to fix my leaky roof myself?
Many people believe that when they have something wrong with their home they should go ahead and fix it themselves. In a lot of cases that can be true but there are certain things in your home that you shouldn’t fix yourself. If you think of your home as the largest investment that you will ever make then you should understand that there are certain parts of the house that should be fixed by professionals.
One of those areas that you should have a professional fix or replace is the roof and roofing material that is covering it.
Your roof is the first line of defence when comes to defending your home against the endless assault that Mother Nature throws at it. Your roof takes the hot sun on it all day; it takes the brunt of the high winds, the driving rain, the dumping snow, the freezing rain and the pounding hail. No other part of your house is assaulted like the roof of your house.
And no other part of a house is installed or repaired more improperly then the roof of your home. I have personally repaired people’s roofs, roof’s that had been repaired by the homeowner creating an even bigger leak and then proceeded to fix the inside of their water damaged home. The homeowner tried to fix it themselves to save a thousand dollars, in the end it cost them over 10,000 dollars for all the drywall, flooring and paint that I had to repair and replace. That was money they could have saved if they had a professional repair it immediately after finding out they had a problem.
Roofing is like a lot of things, the best roofers are the ones with a lot of experience. This is how a lot of homeowners get themselves in trouble; they don’t have enough experience fixing roofs to know how to fix the leak properly.
There are so many things that can go wrong when you go onto a roof; here is just a small list of the things that you as the homeowner can cause;
• If you don’t repair the leak properly you can actually make the leak worse. This happens when homeowners don’t understand how certain flashings work and how they interact with each other.
• You can cause damage to the rest of the roofing material on the roof. A lot of products on your roof do not survive having heavy humans walking on top of it. Steel roofing can dent if you don’t know where to walk. If you have shingles nearing the end of their life you can actually create more leaks with every step you take while walking up the roof.
• You can be seriously injured. Countless homeowners are severely injured or killed from falling off ladders or roofs every year. Most people don’t realize how hard it is to walk around on a roof; one misstep or slip could send you rolling down the roof slope and down to the ground.
• You can damage your eave trough and or facia. If you don’t know where to put your ladder you can easily damage the eave trough or the facia. Most eave trough is aluminum that dents fairly easily and once there is a dent there is no way to remove it unless you replace the trough.
• You could be damaging the structure of your roof by repairing the shingles yourself. A lot of people don’t realize it but by the time that most people notice that you have a leak in your roof months have gone by of water penetrating the home. This can cause rot in the roof sheeting, the plywood or OSB that is on your roof can already be rotting or water damaged. This can cause the sheeting to fail the next time that there is any kind of load on it; snow or even you walking around on it. If it isn’t repaired when the roof is fixed this can lead to a whole host of structural problems in your roof and to a larger repair bill later.
• You could disrupt the way the roof breaths. Roofs need to breath, they need to draw fresh air in through the soffits and allow hot moist air to escape through the top of the roof. These vents can easily be compromised if they are repaired or replaced by someone that doesn’t know what they are doing. If you disrupt this flow you can cause interior moisture problems or even mold issues.
Please have a professional fix your roof; it’s a small cost to protect the investment that you have already made in your home.
Rob Abbott
Operations Manager
Village Builders Inc.
