Salt Lake City roofing
Leaks, ice-dam damage, wind-lifted shingles, failed flashing — we find the real source and fix it, instead of chasing the wet spot on your ceiling.
Call (385) 340-6200A roof repair fixes the one part of your roof that has actually failed — a run of shingles a canyon wind peeled back, a flashing joint that pulled away from a brick chimney, a cracked vent boot, or the rusted metal curb under a swamp cooler — without tearing off shingles that still have years in them. On most Salt Lake City homes the open field wears out slowly while the penetrations and eaves fail first, so a full replacement is rarely the right first move.
Learn the signs so you catch it early. A brown ring on a ceiling or the top of an interior wall, granules washing down into a gutter, damp attic insulation, or shingles you can see curling and cracking from the sidewalk. In winter, a stain that only shows up during a thaw usually points to an ice dam backing water under the shingles at a cold eave, not a hole in the field.
The water almost never enters where the stain appears. It runs down the underside of the deck and along a rafter before it drops, sometimes several feet from the real leak. A repair done right traces the path back to where water actually gets in and closes it — not a bead of caulk over the nearest suspicious spot. If the rest of your roof is sound, we will tell you a repair is the honest call.
We start by finding where water truly enters, which is usually a flashing joint, a valley, a vent penetration, or the swamp cooler curb long before it is the field shingles. When the attic is accessible we walk it and follow the water back along the sheathing and rafters to the entry point, then check the matching spot up top. Patching the stain instead of the source is how leaks come back the next wet spell.
Flashing is the metal that seals your roof where it meets a chimney, a dormer, a skylight, or a wall. On the older brick homes across the Avenues and Sugar House, the step flashing and counterflashing tucked into the mortar joints is the single most common leak we find. We strip the failed metal, cut fresh counterflashing back into the brick where needed, and reseal it so the joint sheds water instead of trapping it behind the wall.
We replace wind-lifted, cracked, or missing shingles and color-match as closely as the existing weathering allows. Valleys move more water than any other part of the roof, so a split or displaced valley liner lets water straight under the shingles. We open only what needs attention, replace the underlayment or metal beneath, and re-lay the courses so the water stays on top of the roof where it belongs.
The rubber gasket around a plumbing vent goes brittle and splits from the UV up here years before the shingles give out, and it leaks in a slow, staining way that is easy to miss. We swap failed boots for ones with a longer-lasting collar. On homes running a rooftop evaporative cooler, we rebuild or reflash the curb and reseal the supply line penetration, which is a leak source almost every older Salt Lake home eventually develops.
If we open a leak and find soft or rotted sheathing underneath, we cut it out and replace it with new decking before anything goes back on — closing up over wet wood only buys you a bigger repair later. We replace underlayment in the work area, magnet-sweep the yard and driveway for nails, and leave you a written record of what we found and what we did, with photos.
You tell us what you are seeing and roughly when it started — a thaw, a windstorm, a summer downpour. We come out, walk the roof, and get into the attic when we can reach it. Storm damage and a slow chronic leak look different up close, and knowing which one you have changes both the fix and how we handle any insurance side of it.
You get an honest answer, not a sales pitch. If the roof has good life left, we scope the repair and price it. If you are two or three patches from needing a full replacement anyway, we say so up front with photos rather than taking your money twice. If a leak is active, we can tarp it to stop the damage while we schedule the permanent fix.
We do the work we scoped — flashing, valley, boots, shingles, decking — and we fix the actual entry point rather than the symptom inside. Most single-source repairs are a same-day job. If we open the roof and find hidden rot or a second failure that was not visible from outside, we call you before we keep going, not after.
We pull the tarps, replace any disturbed underlayment, and run a magnet over the yard and drive for nails so nobody catches one in a tire or a bare foot. You get a description of what failed, what we replaced, and photos of the finished work — useful if you are mid-claim or plan to sell the house and a buyer's inspector comes through.
Salt Lake sits at about 4,300 feet, and the roofs here take two beatings a year. Summer brings intense high-altitude UV that bakes vent gaskets and cooler mastic brittle, while winter runs the roof through repeated freeze-thaw cycles and stacks snow at the eaves. That combination produces two signature problems: split boots and cracked flashing from the sun, and ice dams at cold north-facing eaves where meltwater refreezes and backs up under the shingles. East canyon winds coming off the Wasatch add a third, stripping tabs off exposed slopes and ridges.
Much of the older housing stock — the brick bungalows and steep-pitched Victorians in the Avenues, the ranches and cottages through Sugar House and Millcreek — has masonry chimneys and rooftop evaporative coolers, which are exactly the penetrations that leak first. Salt Lake City requires a building permit for a full reroof, but most targeted repairs do not need one; we will tell you plainly which side of that line your job falls on before we start rather than after.
It depends entirely on what failed and how much got wet before you called. A single cracked vent boot swapped on an accessible slope is a modest same-day fix. Re-flashing a brick chimney, rebuilding a swamp cooler curb, or reworking a valley runs higher because there is more labor and more material. The real cost driver is rot — if water sat long enough to soften the decking, replacing sheathing adds to the job. We price the actual scope after we have seen it, not over the phone.
Most single-source repairs are done in a day, often in a few hours once the crew is on the roof. What stretches a job out is discovering a second failure once we open things up, or finding rotted decking that has to be cut out and replaced before we close the roof back up. Steep Avenues pitches and hard chimney access can add time too. If we expect more than a day, we tell you when we scope it, not partway through.
Sudden, identifiable damage — wind that tore off shingles, a limb through the roof, hail — is usually claimable. Slow wear, brittle boots, and a leak you let run for two years generally are not, because insurers treat those as maintenance. The distinction is whether it was a single event or gradual deterioration. We document what we find with photos and describe the cause plainly, which is what an adjuster needs. We will give you an honest read on whether a claim is worth filing before you call it in.
We match the repair to what is already on your roof. On asphalt shingle roofs that means color-matching the closest available shingle, though weathered shingles never match new ones perfectly and we will be honest about that. For flashing we use proper metal cut and lapped correctly, not a smear of sealant. Vent penetrations get boots with a longer-lasting collar so they outlast the last one. If your roof is tile or metal, the repair method changes accordingly.
Our warranty covers the workmanship on the specific area we repaired — if water comes back through the joint or section we fixed, we come back and make it right. It does not cover a new leak that starts somewhere else on an aging roof we never touched, and it is not a warranty on the whole roof. That is an important distinction: fixing your chimney flashing does not make the twenty-year-old field shingles new. We tell you what we stand behind and what we do not.
When the field shingles are curling, cracking, and shedding granules across the whole roof, patching one spot is throwing good money after bad — you will be back with a new leak within a season. Same if we open the roof and find widespread rotted decking, or if the roof is already near the end of its life for this climate, which for asphalt here tends to run shorter than the label promises because of the UV and freeze-thaw. We will show you the evidence and let you decide.