Roofing across Utah County

Flashing is where roofs leak

Very few roofs fail in the field of the shingles. They fail at the transitions, at a wall, a chimney, a skylight curb, a pipe boot, a valley. Good flashing is metal shaped so water has nowhere to go but out. Bad flashing is sealant spread over a gap and a hope that nobody looks for four years. When we pull a roof apart, the flashing is what tells us whether the last crew was in a hurry.

Step flashing is one piece per course

There is no shortcut version of that detail that works.

Decking is the part nobody plans for

The sheathing under the roof only gets looked at once every couple of decades, which is when the old roof comes off. Older homes up here might have skip sheathing, plank decking with gaps, or plywood that has been soft over a leak for years. It gets replaced where it is bad, because fasteners do not hold in punky wood and a soft deck telegraphs every wave through a new roof.

It is measured, not guessed

Sheet count gets documented once the roof is open, before anything goes back down.

Dry-in is the real milestone

The moment that decides whether a re-roof goes well is not when the last shingle goes down, it is when the deck is covered, taped at the penetrations and sealed at the edges. From that point the house is weather-tight and everything after it is finish work. A crew that understands this never leaves at the end of a day with bare deck showing.

Ice barrier goes down first

Eaves, valleys and every pipe before any field underlayment. Working from the bottom up means every sheet laps over the one below it the way water expects.

Then the metal, then the field

In that order, every time.

Fasteners rust from the inside out

Screws and nails on a roof within reach of the lake air corrode faster than the same hardware would inland. A plain steel nail head disappears under a shingle and takes years off the roof’s hold without a single visible symptom. Hot-dipped galvanized or stainless where the metal is exposed is a small line item that decides whether the roof reaches its rated life.

Mixed metals make it worse

Aluminum flashing pinned with the wrong screw sets up a reaction that eats the softer metal at every contact point.

We look at the old nails

What came out of the last roof tells you what to put in the new one.