How This Works

Each slope from as far back as you can stand, at zoom. Every penetration you can make out — vents, pipes, chimney, skylights. The gutter line along each side. Then indoors: the stain, the ceiling around it, and the attic side of the deck if the attic is safe and lit.

An upstairs window often gives the best angle in the house, and a neighbour's driveway sometimes gives the best one on the street. Neither involves a ladder, and neither does anything else this site asks for.

Written: what the pattern points to, whether the honest description is a repair or the start of a replacement, whether the work would cross the code threshold that pulls the whole roof up to current energy and fire standards, and the ranges for both paths in this area. Where photographs cannot settle it — a suspected structural sag, a leak nobody can reproduce — the read says so rather than inventing a diagnosis.

No visit gets booked and no invoice appears because photographs turned up. If the range makes sense, you are holding a scope to test the next bid against; if it does not, you have a second opinion in writing, which in this trade is worth more than in most, because roofs are sold door to door after every storm.

A photograph shows a surface. It does not show what the decking is doing under the shingles, and no honest read pretends otherwise — the decking question is answered when the covering comes off, and it belongs in a quote as a contingency rather than as a surprise.

Contain it inside: a bucket, and a small hole at the low point of a bulging ceiling so the water drains in one place instead of bringing the plaster down. Move what is underneath. Photograph it during the rain — a leak that appears only in wind-driven rain from one direction has told you something no dry-day inspection will.

A phone number we can actually reach, the roof's age if you happen to know it, and the street — because a parcel inside a mapped fire hazard zone has to be reroofed to a different specification than one outside it.