Garage Roofing

Four reasons, and they compound.

The first is specification. Garage roofs are routinely built with the cheapest available shingle, no ice-and-water membrane, and felt rather than synthetic underlayment, on the reasoning that it is only a garage. That reasoning ignores the fact that the garage is exposed to exactly the same hail, wind and freeze-thaw as the house next to it.

The second is flashing and edge detail. Drip edge is frequently omitted entirely on garages, which means water curls back around the roof edge and runs down the fascia — the exact mechanism that rots the fascia and then drops the eavestrough, if there is one. Where a garage roof meets a wall or a neighbouring structure, step flashing is often absent or improvised.

The third is the absence of eavestrough. A garage without eavestrough sheds its entire roof volume in a curtain along the base of the wall, which erodes the grade, undermines the pad edge, wicks into the bottom plate, and in a lane creates a sheet of ice every winter where the runoff crosses.

The fourth is that nobody inspects it. A house roof gets looked at when the ceiling stains. A garage roof gets looked at when the roof sheathing is already gone, because there is no finished ceiling below to show a leak and nobody is standing under it in the rain.

The practical consequence: by the time a garage roof visibly needs work, there is often deck damage as well, which is why we quote the sheathing per sheet rather than assuming.

The same sequence as a house, on a smaller building. Protection first — the lane, the fence line, any vehicles and the neighbouring property, because lane-access garages sit close to other people's things and a careless tear-off makes enemies.

Tear off to the deck. Garage roofs frequently have more than one layer, because overlaying was the easy option for whoever did it last, and that doubles the tear-off and the disposal weight. We price that honestly once we have looked.

Inspect the deck. On older garages this is where the real condition shows: soft or rotten sheathing at the eaves, delamination, and sometimes original board decking with gaps too wide to hold a nail reliably. We photograph it, show you, and replace what needs replacing at the per-sheet rate on your quote.

Look at the structure while it is open, because this is the only convenient moment. Sagging rafters, cracked members, bottom plates that have rotted where runoff has been hitting the wall for years, and framing that was never square. If the structure is failing, re-roofing it is money spent on a building that needs more than a roof, and we will say so.

Then rebuild the system: ice-and-water membrane at the eaves, synthetic underlayment, new drip edge on every edge, new step flashing where the roof meets anything, new pipe boots, and shingles to the manufacturer's nailing pattern in the line and colour matching your house. Eavestroughs go on if they are missing or shot, with a downspout and an extension that carries the water away from the pad rather than into the lane.

The single strongest argument for doing a garage roof is timing, and it is a straightforward one.

Roofing costs are substantially fixed-cost: getting a crew to your address, getting a disposal bin delivered and hauled, getting materials trucked and staged. Those costs are incurred once whether we are covering one roof or two. Adding a garage to a house re-roof spreads them across both, and the marginal cost of the garage is materially lower than its standalone price.

Do them separately and you pay the mobilization twice. Worse, you end up with two roofs on two different clocks, which means doing this again in a few years instead of both at once in twenty.

There is also a matching argument. Shingle lines are discontinued and colours are reformulated. A garage shingled three years after the house from the same nominal colour will very often not match, and on a lane-facing lot where both roofs are visible from the same vantage that is noticeable.

The same logic applies to hail claims, and more strongly. If a storm damaged the house roof it almost certainly damaged the garage, and having both inspected and documented in one scope means one approval rather than a second claim conversation months later — by which time the connection to the storm is harder to establish.

Detached garages are the single most commonly overlooked structure on a hail claim. A homeowner files for the house, the adjuster inspects the house, and the garage — which took identical hail from the identical storm — is never looked at.

That omission costs real money, because the garage roof then ages out on its own with damage nobody documented, and by the time it is obvious, the claim window has closed and the link to the storm is no longer provable.

Garage roofs also frequently carry the clearest evidence on the property. Because they are often shingled with cheaper three-tab, they show hail damage more visibly than a heavier architectural shingle on the house does. And garage doors, being large flat sheets of soft metal, take dents that are among the most persuasive corroboration an adjuster can have that a hail event of a given stone size occurred at that address.

We inspect the house and the garage together as one property, photograph both, and put both in a single scope. It is materially easier for an adjuster to approve, and it means you end up with a property where everything is the same age going forward rather than a new house roof over a garage on its last legs.

Calgary's lane-access neighbourhoods are where most of this work is — Bowness, Renfrew, Killarney, Inglewood, Ramsay, Mount Pleasant, Bridgeland, Highland Park, Marda Loop, Altadore, Capitol Hill, Tuxedo Park, Crescent Heights. Those garages are frequently fifty or sixty years old, on their second or third roof, and quite often on their second or third layer of shingles.

In the suburbs and surrounding towns the garages are newer and the issue is usually specification rather than age: builder-grade three-tab installed with no membrane and no drip edge, reaching the end well ahead of the house roof above the attached garage.

On acreages the same work extends to shops, barns and outbuildings, and those roofs are almost always the most neglected structures on the parcel — because nobody stands under them and there is no ceiling to show a leak. We inspect them all in one visit rather than the house alone, which is both cheaper for you and how the quiet problems get caught.

We cover Calgary and every quadrant of it, plus Airdrie, Chestermere, Cochrane, Okotoks, High River, Langdon, Strathmore, Crossfield, Carstairs, Didsbury, Olds, Innisfail, Red Deer, Sylvan Lake, Canmore, Beiseker, Three Hills, Drumheller, Nanton, Diamond Valley, Bragg Creek, Springbank and Bearspaw.