Roof Replacement
Chattanooga, TN & North Georgia

When a Roof Has Reached the End

Architectural shingles in this climate generally give you somewhere in the range of two decades, and heat, humidity, and hail all shorten that. But age is not the whole story — how the roof was installed, how well the attic breathes, and how many layers are already up there matter just as much.

These are the signs we take seriously when we inspect a roof in Chattanooga or North Georgia:

• Granules in the gutters. The mineral surface is what protects the asphalt underneath. Once it is washing off in quantity, the countdown is short.
• Curling, cupping, or brittle shingles. A shingle that cracks when it flexes cannot be repaired, only replaced.
• Daylight or moisture in the attic. The clearest evidence there is, and the one homeowners see least often because nobody goes up there.
• Sagging between rafters. That is decking failure, not a shingle problem, and it does not get better.
• Two layers already installed. A third is not the answer, and in most cases is not permitted.
• Repeated repairs in different spots. When the same roof fails in three places, the roof is telling you something.

What a Replacement Actually Involves

A real replacement is a tear-off, not an overlay. We strip the old roof to the deck, inspect and replace any sheathing that is soft or rotted, and then rebuild the system: ice and water shield in the valleys and at vulnerable penetrations, synthetic underlayment across the field, new drip edge, new flashing at every wall and chimney and skylight, the shingle itself, and ridge venting sized to the attic.

The parts that get skipped on a cheap roof are almost always the flashing and the ventilation — because neither is visible from the driveway once the job is done, and both are what make the difference between a roof that reaches its rated life and one that does not.

Ventilation Is Not Optional

An under-ventilated attic in a humid Southern summer cooks shingles from underneath and holds moisture against the decking through the winter. We size intake and exhaust as part of the quote rather than reinstalling whatever was there — a lot of the prematurely aged roofs we replace failed for this reason rather than from anything that happened on the surface.

Permits, Cleanup, and What You Are Left With

We pull the permit — a re-roof inside the Chattanooga city limits is a residential modification permit through the city's Land Development Office, and Georgia jobs go through the relevant county or city. The old roof leaves with us, the site gets magnet-swept for nails, and you get the manufacturer's warranty documentation for what was actually installed. If your roof turns out not to need any of this, we will tell you that too — a repair may be all it needs.