Free Roof Inspections From Converse Roofers

Financing provided by Slice, Foundation Finance, Regions. Subject to credit approval. Rates, terms, and promotional periods are set by the lender and disclosed in writing before you sign.

Recent Converse Roofing Projects

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

The Attic Half of a Roof Inspection

Half of what we learn about a roof, we learn from underneath it. The shingles tell you how the surface has weathered. The attic tells you why, and it is the part most inspections skip because it takes time and nobody enjoys crawling through insulation on a warm afternoon.

With a light, we look at the underside of the sheathing for dark staining, which maps out where moisture has been sitting even when there's no active drip. Rusted nail tips point to condensation rather than a leak, and the difference matters enormously, because a condensation problem will ruin a new roof just as surely as it ruined the old one.

We check whether insulation has been packed into the eaves and choked off the intake, whether baffles exist at all, and where the bath and kitchen fans actually terminate. A fan dumping into the attic is one of the most common things we find and one of the cheapest to correct.

We also read the framing. Sagging between rafters, previous repairs, added weight from a second layer of covering, or a spot where somebody set a foot through and patched it from above. Any of that changes the scope, and it's far better known before you sign than discovered on tear-off day.

If your house has no attic access, or the ceilings are finished right up to the deck, we say so and adjust. In that case a moisture reading from below, a careful look at the soffit and ridge from outside, and a closer study of how the surface has aged carry more weight.

It is a slightly less complete picture, and we'll tell you it's less complete instead of pretending otherwise. Where the attic is only partly reachable, we get as far in as we safely can and note which sections of the deck we were able to see and which we were not, so the report reflects what was actually looked at.

What You Can See and What You Can't in Converse

From the ground you can pick up more than most people expect. Tabs that have begun to curl at the corners read as a slightly rough texture along the lower courses. Missing shingles are obvious enough.

Dark streaks running down a slope are usually algae rather than damage, common on the shaded side and mostly a cosmetic matter, though it does hold moisture against the surface longer than anyone would like. Washed out patches where the color has gone pale mean the granules have worn off, and once that layer is gone the sun starts working on the mat underneath.

What you can't see from down there's most of what actually matters. Fastener condition, whether the seal strips are still bonded, how much life is left in the flashing metal, and whether the deck has soft spots underfoot are all hands and knees findings.

A roof can look presentable from the street and still be a season or two from real trouble, and the reverse happens just as often. Plenty of roofs that look awful are simply dirty.

Then there's the part only the attic will show you. Moisture staining on the underside of the sheathing, rusted nail tips, insulation compressed flat at the eaves, and daylight where there should not be any all point to conditions that never announce themselves on the surface. Homeowners are frequently surprised that we spend as long inside as we do on top, but that's where a roof tells the truth about how it has been living.

So the honest answer to whether you need a new roof is that nobody can hand it to you from the sidewalk. Anyone quoting a replacement without going up and going in is reading from a script. When we finish, you get the photographs from all three vantage points along with a plain explanation of what each one means, whether that points toward a full replacement, a repair, or a note to look again in a season or two.

Fall Wind and Older Shingles

Wind rarely takes a healthy roof apart. What it does is find the places that had already let go and finish them, which is why a storm can strip half a slope off one house and leave the neighbors untouched.

The mechanism is straightforward. Every shingle has a strip of adhesive that bonds it to the course below, and that bond is what makes the whole field act as one surface instead of a stack of loose tabs.

That seal weakens with age and with heat cycling, and it doesn't reform once it's broken. A tab that got lifted in a summer storm and laid back down looks perfectly normal from the ground while sitting there unbonded, waiting.

Come fall, when the systems move through with sustained wind rather than a brief gust, air gets under that edge and the tab levers up. Once one goes, the one above it has lost its hold as well, and the failure walks up the slope in a line.

Edges and corners take the worst of it because wind speeds up as it goes over them. Rakes, ridges and the first few courses above an eave are where we find the majority of wind losses, along with ridge caps, which sit in the fastest air on the entire house.

Trees make it worse in a way people don't expect. A limb that has been sweeping the same patch of roof in every windy stretch for a few years will wear through the surface as surely as weather does.

After a windy week, the useful habit is a walk around the house looking up. Missing tabs are obvious enough.

Less obvious is a slope where the courses no longer look uniform, or a ridge line with a gap in it, or bits of shingle in the flower beds. Any of those is worth a look before winter, because a lifted tab is a cheap fix in October and a wet ceiling in February.

Measuring a Converse Roof Before Pricing It

Pricing starts with area, and area on a roof is not the same as the footprint of the house. A steep roof covers considerably more surface than a shallow one over the same rooms, which is why two houses with identical square footage inside can need very different amounts of material. So the first thing that happens is a real measurement, plane by plane, either walked with a tape and a wheel or pulled from aerial imagery and then verified on site.

Pitch gets recorded for every slope, and it does two jobs in the estimate. It sets the area, and it sets the labor. A crew can move comfortably on a moderate pitch and work most of the day.

Past a certain steepness they need staging, roof jacks and harness anchors, everything gets carried up by hand instead of slid, and the same square of shingles takes considerably longer to install. That's not padding. It's the honest cost of working on a surface people cannot stand on.

Waste is the part homeowners rarely hear about. A simple gable roof wastes very little, because most bundles get installed whole.

A roof with several valleys, dormers and hips wastes a good deal more, since every shingle running into a valley or up a hip gets cut and the offcut usually goes in the dumpster. A fair estimate states the waste factor openly, and a cut-up roof will always carry a higher one.

The measurement also produces the counts everything else hangs on. Linear feet of eave and rake for the starter and the drip edge, linear feet of ridge and hip for the caps, linear feet of valley for the membrane, the number of penetrations needing new collars, and the length of every wall the roof runs into.

When those numbers appear on your estimate, you can check them against your own house. When they don't appear at all, you are being asked to trust a number nobody has shown their work for.

Two Warranties Every Converse Roof Should Have

When somebody tells you a roof is covered for decades, they are describing one of two very different promises, and it's worth knowing which. The first comes from the company that made the material.

It covers the shingle failing on its own, which is rare, and it's limited by whether the roof was installed the way the printed instructions require. Nailing in the wrong place, skipping the starter course or leaving the attic starved for air can all reduce that coverage to nothing, and the manufacturer isn't the one who did any of those things.

The second promise comes from the contractor and covers workmanship. That's the one that matters in the first years, because when a new roof leaks it is nearly always the installation rather than the material.

Ask how long that coverage runs, get the terms as a document, and read what voids it. Ask whether it transfers if you sell, since that can be worth something on a listing, and ask what the process looks like when you call about a leak while it is still in force.

Then ask the question underneath both of them, which is whether the company will still be around. A long workmanship period from an outfit that appeared after the last big hail event is not worth much. How long have they been working in this part of the state, is there a physical address you could drive to, and who answers the phone in the slow months when nobody is knocking on doors.

It's also fair to ask what they would do about a leak after the coverage expires. There's no right answer written down anywhere, but you learn a lot from how the question lands. Most established companies will tell you they come out and look either way and charge only if it turns into real work, because the alternative is a bad story circulating in a neighborhood where they hope to keep working for a long time.

Where Our Converse Roofs Have Gone

These are roofing jobs we've finished in neighborhoods around Converse and nearby. Pick one to see what we picked up working on those streets.

Where we respond near Converse

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