Roof inspection
An inspection is worth its cost when it answers a decision you are about to make: buying a house, planning next summer’s budget, or deciding whether a covering has one more winter in it. In a climate with a six-month working season, knowing the answer in March is worth considerably more than knowing it in August.
When it earns its price
Three moments justify the cost. Before a purchase: roof condition is one of the largest numbers hiding in a house, and in this market it comes with a second question most buyers never ask: does this house dam at the eaves? The answer lives in the attic, not the listing photos.
After the thaw: March and April are when winter’s work becomes visible and when the season’s calendar is still open. And near the end of a covering’s life, when the real question is “this summer or in three years”: a documented answer beats a guess in either direction, because replacing early wastes remaining life and replacing late buys deck replacement on top of the same roof.
What gets checked
On the surface: ridge caps and the scattered small failures that mark thermal fatigue; granule loss across the field, worst on the south and west slopes; the condition of valleys and what is sitting in them; sealant and flashing at every chimney, wall and vent penetration: including the garage-to-house junction that carries meltwater all winter; and the rubber boots at plumbing vents, which crack in their second decade and are often a roof’s first true leak.
On the attic side, which matters more here than anywhere else in the region : intake at the soffits and whether insulation has buried it; exhaust at the ridge and whether it is sized to match; frost or staining on the underside of the deck; bath fans ducted into the attic instead of outside; and air leaks around fixtures and the hatch. A Minnesota roof report that skips the attic has skipped the half that explains February.
What the report is good for
What a written report really buys is comparability. Named findings and photographs mean three quotes are answering the same questions instead of describing three different roofs, and they turn a purchase negotiation from opinion into something documented. In a six-month installing season that also decides the timing: a report in February is a June booking, while the same conclusion reached in August is whoever is still free.
Inspecting a roof through a Twin Cities winter
- Can a roof be inspected in a Minnesota winter?
- The attic can, and in winter it says the most. NOAA's records at MSP average about a hundred and forty-five nights at or below freezing and some fifty-five inches of snow a year over the last decade, and the melt pattern on the snow in January says more about the attic than the shingles will say in June. The covering gets its turn once the roof is bare and dry.
- How many layers is the inspector counting, and why does it matter here?
- Code limits the layers, and the ice membrane the code requires at the eaves cannot be installed over an existing roof. So the count decides whether the next job can be a recover at all, and the report should state it plainly: one layer or two, read from the rake and from the attic.
- What does the inspection say about a rambler with a finished attic?
- That the knee-wall pockets are where the trouble lives. A finished attic leaves short, closed spaces behind the walls where warm air meets a cold roof, and the intake at the eave is usually buried. The report should say whether those pockets were opened and what was found.
- Does the report cover the walkout side separately?
- On an Eagan or Burnsville walkout, it should. The exposed lower wall and the roof above it see wind and sun the other side does not, and a roof that is fine on the street side can be done on the walkout side. One grade per slope, not one per house.
- What kind of finding fails a roof inspection in this climate?
- A soffit intake buried under insulation, ice barrier that stops short of the code distance up the slope, flashing sealed to a chimney rather than cut into the mortar, and a knee-wall pocket that was never opened during a finished-attic remodel. Any one of these can fail a report on a covering that otherwise reads as sound, because a Minnesota inspection grades the attic system as its own finding, not as a footnote to the shingles.
- Why do I keep getting calls about roof inspections?
- Most of that outreach is generated from an address list rather than from anything actually seen on your roof, and it tends to pick up after any long winter of ice dams in the metro. A real inspection is one you scheduled for a reason you can name, and it comes with a written report and photographs, not a same-visit sales pitch.
- 1 Ridge caps. Fatigued by an annual swing few other climates ask of a roof.
- 2 The field. Snow load and age together, not one or the other.
- 3 Valleys. Meltwater runs under the snowpack here, out of sight.
- 4 Flashing. The chimney, and where a lower roof meets a wall.
- 5 The vent boot. Cold makes the rubber brittle, then a thaw opens the crack.
- 6 Eaves and ice dams. Ice builds at the edge wherever attic heat is escaping.