Mobile Roof Repair

Roof Leak Repair

Water is a liar. The stain on your ceiling above the hallway is almost never directly under the hole, because water rides the top of a rafter eight or ten feet before it drops. So roof leak repair starts with tracing, not tearing. We pull shingles back around the suspect area, check the nail pops, the valley metal, the pipe boots that go brittle after about ten Mobile summers, and the step flashing where a dormer meets the field.

Kick-out flashing is the one everybody skips. Without it, every August downpour dumps roof water straight behind the wall. We handle siding installation in Mobile as well, so we see what that does to sheathing, and it isn't pretty.

Most repairs like this take a morning. The rot underneath is what stretches it.

Roof Replacement

Sometimes patching is just feeding good money to a bad roof. If a third of the slope is bare, the deck feels spongy underfoot, or you're on your fourth round of roof repair in two summers, replacement is the honest answer.

Here's what a full roof replacement looks like on a typical Mobile house. Old layers come off down to the decking, and any soft plywood gets cut out and swapped before anything new goes down. Then drip edge, synthetic underlayment, starter strip, and shingles nailed six per for our wind zone, because four nails and Gulf gusts don't mix. Two to three days on most homes, longer with steep pitch or multiple valleys.

What changes the number is square footage, pitch, layers coming off, and how much rotten deck we find.

Plenty of folks pair it with siding installation in Mobile while the ladders are already up. Any roof replacement contractor worth calling will tell you the deck matters more than the shingle color.

Leaking Roof

A leaking roof almost never drips where the hole is. Water runs down a rafter, crosses the attic, and shows up fifteen feet away as a brown ring over your dining room table. So the stain tells you there's a problem, not where it started.

Around here the usual suspects are cracked plumbing boots, which give up after about eight to ten years of Gulf sun, and flashing at chimneys and wall junctions. If it only drips during a driving rain out of the south, that's wind pushing water sideways under shingles or behind wall trim, and sometimes it's not the roof at all, which is why we handle siding installation in Mobile too.

Wait it out and the decking goes soft. In our humidity, mold shows up in an attic in a couple of weeks, not months.

Urgent Roof Repairs

Urgent doesn't always mean midnight. Plenty of the urgent roof repairs I get called out on start as a brown ring on a bedroom ceiling after a June downpour, and by the time that ring doubles in size, the decking above it has gone soft.

First thing we do is dry it in: tarp screwed down through battens, not weighted with cinder blocks that walk off in the next gust coming off the Bay. Then we open the area up and find the real entry point, usually a popped nail, a cracked pipe boot, or a valley that's been shedding granules for years. Ice and water shield goes down before any shingle does.

Skip that step and water tracks sideways along a rafter and surfaces ten feet from where it got in.

Emergency Roof Repair

Emergency roof repair is about the next twenty four hours, not the next twenty years. When a squall line comes through and a limb opens up your decking, the first job is keeping water out of the ceiling, and that means a reinforced tarp screwed to furring strips and run over the ridge, not a blue poly sheet held down with cinder blocks. Tarps done the lazy way tear loose in the next gust and leave you with more nail holes than you started with.

We work nine to five Monday through Friday, and when a roof genuinely can't wait, we'll come out on a Saturday.

Pitch, height and how much area needs covering are what move a temporary repair either way. And since siding installation in Mobile is our everyday work, we'll tell you what the walls took too.

Flat Roof Repair

Flat roofs don't leak because they're flat. They leak because water sat there for three days after a Gulf downpour and found the one lap seam somebody rolled cold instead of welding.

Most of what I patch around downtown is modified bitumen and TPO, and the failure points are boring and predictable: open seams, cracked pipe boots, flashing at the parapet, and scuppers packed with live oak leaves. If water is still standing 48 hours after the rain quits, you've got a drainage problem, not just a membrane problem, and patching over it buys you one season. Good roof repair means cutting out the wet insulation underneath, drying the deck, then welding new membrane in.

Where a low slope ties into a wall, the wall covering matters too, and since we handle siding installation in Mobile, we close both sides of that joint properly.

Tin Roof Repair

Most of the tin around here is exposed fastener, 5V crimp or corrugated, and it almost never leaks through the metal itself. It leaks at the screws. Those neoprene washers bake in the Gulf sun, shrink, and back out over ten or fifteen years, and then every fastener is a straw. The fix is usually oversized gasket screws set into fresh holes, butyl tape at the laps, and new closure strips at the ridge, not a bucket of black roof cement smeared over everything. That stuff traps water against the panel and rusts it from underneath.

We walk purlins, not the flat of the pan, so you don't get a dented roof out of a roof leak repair.

Same crew that does siding installation in Mobile handles the trim and flashing, so profiles actually match.

What the job involves

Every roof repair I do starts in the attic, not on the ladder. Daylight through the decking, rusty nail tips, a dark stain on a rafter, that tells me more than ten minutes of walking the shingles ever will. Then we go up top, pull back the damaged field, check the decking underneath, and replace anything soft before new underlayment and shingles go down. Flashing gets replaced, not caulked over. Caulk is a two year fix pretending to be a ten year one.

Most repairs we run here take half a day to a full day. Pitch, access, how much plywood is rotted, and whether the chimney or a valley is involved are what move the roof repair cost.

I came up doing siding installation in Mobile, so the wall-to-roof step flashing and kickouts get done right.

What it costs

Honest answer: I can't price a roof repair from a keyboard, and anybody who does is guessing with your money. What moves the number is how big the wet area is, whether we're talking one cracked pipe boot or twelve feet of soft decking under a valley, how steep the pitch is, and whether the shingle color you bought years ago is still made. A roof leak repair cost on a single flashing detail looks nothing like a new roof cost after an August squall off the bay lifts a whole slope and you're into roof replacement instead.

Want a real figure for your house? Call the office, (251) 551-3653, and I'll get up there and measure it.

Same visit for the walls, since siding installation in Mobile runs around $3.43 a square foot for mid-grade vinyl, and wind damage rarely stops at the roofline.

Why choose us for this

You've got a brown ring on the ceiling that showed up after the last squall blew in off the bay, and what you actually want isn't craftsmanship. It's to hire somebody once, not supervise them, and never look at that ring again.

So here's what I won't do.

I won't quote you low and pad the invoice with things I claim I spotted from the ground.

I won't pull my crew off your open roof to start somebody else's job.

I won't lean on you to sign before I've left the driveway.

I won't leave nails in your grass for your tires to find in October.

There will be a cheaper number than mine. It usually skips the underlayment and flashing details that keep a repair holding through August storms. Over 9 years of roof repair and siding installation in Mobile teaches you which corners cost you later. The estimate costs nothing, and nothing about it obligates you.

Frequently asked questions