Why roofs fail
Ask anyone who repairs roofs where they leak and the answer is the same: not in the middle, but wherever the roof meets something else.
- 1 The ridge. One ridge over two households, and one of them pays to replace it.
- 2 The field. The part everyone looks at, and rarely the part that actually failed.
- 3 Valleys. Most of them were cut in later, when the house was divided into flats.
- 4 The chimney. Often two of them, and often neither one carries anything any more.
- 5 Penetrations. Two kitchens and two bathrooms mean twice the holes on the same roof.
- 6 The overhang. Where heat from a flat you do not control comes back down as ice.
The six
- Heat you don’t controlThe heat that wrecks the roof is not yours
- Ridge vent, no intakeA ridge vent with nothing feeding it
- Very old stockNothing here is the age it looks
- Converted housesThe house was cut up, and the roof shows it
- Disused chimneysThe chimney that stopped working years ago
- Twice the holesTwo households, twice the holes
What this region does to a roof
A winter that hovers at freezing and crosses the line dozens of times, working on every seam. Capes and split-levels with finished rooms in the roof, leaving knee-wall pockets that cannot be ventilated like an attic. A second layer of shingles hiding a deck nobody has seen in forty years. Skylights and dormers whose flashing was sealed rather than layered. Roof planes that stop against a wall. And a fascia edge quietly going soft behind the gutters. Most of what ends a roof here traces back to one of those.