When to Consider Renovating Your Roof
The roof of your home plays a more important role than you think. It does a lot more than just provide a convenient cap to your home. Your roof helps to protect your home from the elements, as well as temperature fluctuations. A roof should be insulated enough to not drive up your heating/cooling bill too much while still letting your home “breathe.” A roof is also a costly thing to have replaced, so you should only embark on the task if you absolutely need to.
When is that point, exactly? Well, consider these tell-tale signs that your roof is on the way out:
Check your attic
The inside of your home is your first indicator as to whether or not your roof is working as it should. Take a flashlight with you and go up into the attic. You’re looking for either beam of light coming through, or for tell-tale staining/streaking of water along with your home interior. Those two criteria are sure signs your roof is leaking to some degree.
Inspect your shingles
Take a look at all of the shingles that make up your roof. Do they lie flat? Are any patches discolored compared to the rest? Are there any signs of breakage or cracking? Your shingles looking worse for wear is one of the easiest ways to discover your roof is at the end of its life. Some minor repairs can be done according to LIFT Construction Roofing, like fixing a handful of shingles or sealing a few bits here and there. If you’re taking enough time to need a proper plan of attack, however, it might be time to call in the professionals. Another good thing to check would be your gutters/drain pipes. If there’s a lot of shingle granules present, that’s a good sign your shingles are on the way out.
Plant growth is a bad sign
If you can see moss growing in any parts of your roof, that’s a bad sign. It means that there’s sufficient trapped moisture to support the growth of mold/fungi besides the obvious moss. Your roof shouldn’t be a haven for a new life. It’s meant to act as a barrier between your home and the natural world.
Look at your roof warranty
Double-check the documentation relating to your roof. Most roofing companies give a guarantee of about 20-25 years depending on what the roof is made out of, as well as what the installation process was like. Armed with this information, you can hit the Internet to do some research on the remaining lifespan of your roof. At the bare minimum, your roof approaching the end of its warranty is a good sign that it’s close to failure, as most warranties are only slightly shorter than a roof’s active lifespan.
Conclusion
As expensive as it might seem, a bad roof can actually end up costing you a lot more in the long run. Things like letting in too much moisture, as well as the overall inefficiency of your temperature systems, can add up quickly. Mold removal can be extremely costly, too. That’s not even counting the detrimental effects it has on your health. Make sure to inspect your roof inside and out while comparing it to how much lifespan you expect it to have left. A few minor nicks and failures mean a lot less to a roof with ten years of life, compared to the same signs on a roof with a mere five years of life remaining.
