Roof repair

Roof Repair in Dexter, Michigan

A majority of the houses inside the City of Dexter were built between 1990 and 2009, which means an unusually large share of this town's roofs are hitting the same age at the same time — sealant strips releasing, pipe boots splitting, flashing that was never quite right to begin with. Around that sits a pre-1940 core near Baker, Central and Dexter-Ann Arbor with real chimneys and plank decking, a 1970s township cohort on a second or third roof, and lake cottages on Portage, Silver and Halfmoon that were assembled in stages over decades. Our work here is leaks, flashing, ice dams and storm-lifted shingles, across the city, Dexter, Webster and Scio Townships.

Providing roof repair for the City of Dexter and Dexter Township, including Webster and Scio Township parcels with a Dexter mailing address.

How do you figure out where a Dexter roof is actually leaking?

Water travels along the rafters and the decking before it drops, so the stain on a bedroom ceiling is often well away from where the water got in. We trace it backward from the attic rather than guessing from the stain. In Dexter's older houses along Baker, Central and Dexter-Ann Arbor Road, that path usually ends at chimney flashing, an aged valley, or step flashing that was reused at the last re-roof. In the 1990s and 2000s subdivisions — Huron Farms, Dexter Crossing, Westridge — it is frequently a cracked pipe boot, a sealant strip that let go across an elevation, or a box-vented attic that was never given real soffit intake. On the lake side, roofs built up in stages over fifty-plus years tend to leak at the dead valleys and low-slope additions where three or four planes meet at odd angles. We get on the roof and in the attic before we say which one it is, and we put the finding in writing before anyone touches a shingle.

51.4%

City of Dexter homes built 1990–2009 — the first-repair generation

1997

Median year built inside the City of Dexter

16.8%

City housing built before 1940 — chimney and valley flashing territory

3×

One-inch-plus hail dates recorded at Dexter since 2019

The 1990s and 2000s cohort is at the age where repairs start

With 51.4 percent of the City of Dexter constructed between 1990 and 2009, nearly one-third of the city’s housing stock arrived during the 2000s. Huron Farms went in 2000 and 2001, Dexter Crossing through the 1990s, and Westridge of Dexter from 1997 onward. That is not a coincidence spread evenly across decades; it is a wave, and a wave means an unusually large share of the city's roofs are reaching seventeen to thirty-five years old within a few years of each other.

What was on those roofs originally, as a rule, was builder-grade shingles over thin OSB decking, box vents rather than a continuous ridge, a single course of ice barrier at the eave, and in the earliest of them no drip edge at the rakes at all, since Michigan did not require drip edge at both eaves and rakes until 2012. None of that was wrong when it was installed. It is simply the specification that has run its course, and it fails the same way across the subdivision at roughly the same time: pipe boots split from UV exposure first, usually by year ten to fifteen; sealant strips between shingle courses release next, so a whole elevation starts lifting in the wind at once; and ridge cap begins to walk loose on the slope that faces the prevailing wind.

A repair on a roof like this is often the right call rather than an automatic push toward a full tear-off. If the damage is confined to one area — a few courses at a rake, a single failed boot, a section of ridge — and the deck underneath is sound, fixing just that section buys real years. What we will not do is patch a problem that has already spread across the whole roof and call it solved; if sealant has let go on an entire slope, isolated shingle replacement will not hold, and we will tell you that plainly rather than sell a repair that will not last the winter.

The old village core: 16.8 percent of the city predates 1940

Along Baker Road, Central Street and Dexter-Ann Arbor Road, nearly seventeen percent of the city's housing dates to before 1940. These roofs are a different repair entirely — steeper pitches, plank decking instead of sheet panels, porch and addition roofs tied in at shallow angles. On a house like this, a leak is rarely the field of the roof; it is a flashing detail, an aged valley, or an addition roof meeting the original structure at a pitch nobody designed for.

Repairing these roofs means opening up the specific area rather than guessing from the ground. A soft spot at a valley or counter flashing that has pulled away from mortar that has itself started to go — each of those needs to be seen up close before we can tell you honestly whether it is a focused repair or a sign that the surrounding courses need to come off too.

Townships, lake cottages and roofs built in stages

Dexter Township carries a bigger 1970s cohort than the city does, which puts a meaningful share of township houses on a second or even third roof covering rather than a first one. The usual findings on those are consistent: a layover hiding a softer deck underneath, an attic vented by nothing more than two gable louvers, a bath fan that dumps into the attic rather than venting through the roof, and a valley worn through at the center from decades of water concentrating there.

Along Portage, Silver, Halfmoon and the smaller lakes, a lot of what started as a seasonal cottage in the 1920s through 1950s became a year-round house with additions stacked on over time. Those roofs have three or four planes meeting at angles nobody planned for, dead valleys that hold water and leaves rather than shedding them, and minimal ventilation over the parts that were added on later — which is exactly where ice dams form hardest in winter. On a plank-decked cottage especially, we cannot tell you the true condition of the sheathing until we open the specific area that is leaking, and we put in writing how we will handle it if we find more than we expected.

Call (810) 588-3933

Flashing: where many Dexter roof leaks start

Flashing is wherever two surfaces meet — a chimney, a sidewall, a skylight, a valley — and it is where roofs fail far more often than in the open field of shingles. The shingles themselves are built to shed water downhill; a flashing detail has to redirect water around something that interrupts that slope, and that is a harder job done with metal and sealant rather than overlapping courses.

Chimney leaks on Dexter's older houses usually come from counter flashing that has worked loose from the mortar joint, or from mortar that has started to deteriorate. Sidewall flashing, where a roof plane meets a wall or a dormer, fails for a related reason: step flashing is supposed to be a new piece at every course, and on a lot of re-roofs we find the old flashing pieces simply reused rather than replaced, which means the laps no longer line up the way they should.

Skylight leaks are almost always the flashing kit or the seal around the unit rather than the glass itself, and we will tell you honestly whether reflashing solves it or whether the unit has reached the end of its own life. Pipe boots are a common isolated failure across Dexter, typically starting to crack and split around year ten to fifteen regardless of the roof's age otherwise, because the rubber degrades from UV exposure faster than the shingles around it.

Valleys deserve their own mention because a valley carries significant water volume. A valley that was woven with shingles rather than lined with metal, or a dead valley on a stage-built cottage roof that collects standing water, is a common repair.

Wind-lifted and unsealed shingles

Shingles still being on the roof does not mean the roof is fine. Wind routinely breaks the sealant bond between shingle courses without actually removing a shingle — the tab lifts, flexes under the gust, and lays back down looking untouched from the driveway. From the ground, a wind-damaged roof and an undamaged one can look identical. From on top of the roof, the difference is obvious: an unsealed tab lifts freely under a hand with no resistance at all.

Damage like this starts almost always at the edges — the rake, the eave and the ridge — before it shows up in the open field of the roof, which is another reason a ground-level look misses much of it. Once a tab has lost its seal, it stays vulnerable to wind-driven rain getting underneath it even if it never blows off, and a missed resealed-tab repair after a wind event is a frequent reason a roof that looked fine in the fall is leaking by spring.

Dexter's wind record is dominated by trees rather than open straight-line gusts — oaks and maples along Huron River Drive and around the lake chain come down onto roofs and roadways in nearly every severe thunderstorm event on file for this area — but the EF3 tornado that crossed the area on March 15, 2012 is the clearest example of what wind alone can do to a roof here, separate from any falling limb. That storm carried peak winds of 135 to 140 mph on a path that ran roughly 7.57 miles through the Dexter area, and the National Weather Service survey recorded minor roof damage where the tornado first touched down, exterior structural damage through the Horseshoe Bend subdivision, and at Huron Farms one home destroyed and another left with only its interior rooms standing before the storm lifted near Zeeb Road. If your roof was replaced in 2012 after that storm, it is now well into its second decade, and the honest next question is what specification it was actually replaced to rather than simply how old it is.

Ice dams: a Dexter winter problem, and how we handle them

Ice dams are not really a roof problem or a gutter problem — they are an attic problem that shows up on the roof. Heat escaping the living space below warms the underside of the deck, melts the snow sitting on the upper, warmer part of the roof, and that meltwater runs downhill until it reaches the eave and overhang, which hang out past the heated part of the house and stay cold. There it refreezes, the ice ridge grows with every cycle, and the next round of meltwater has nowhere to go but backward, up under the shingle courses. Shingles are built to shed water running downhill; they are not sealed against water being pushed uphill underneath them.

Michigan's building code sets a floor for exactly this situation: an ice barrier has to run from the lowest edge of every roof surface to at least 24 inches inside the exterior wall line. That is a minimum, not a target. On Dexter's older housing — plank decks, attics that were never designed to breathe properly — we treat it as exactly what it is and generally run a longer stretch than the code minimum calls for. On the lake cottages with additions tacked onto low-slope sections, the ice barrier has to extend under roofing that was never designed as one continuous assembly in the first place, which is part of why those roofs need a careful look rather than a standard eave treatment.

When ice dam damage shows up as a repair call, we separate the two problems rather than treating them as one. The repair addresses what the water already did — saturated decking, stained drywall, damaged underlayment, shingle courses pushed out of position. The fix addresses why it happened at all: air leaks around attic penetrations, thin or uneven insulation at the eaves, blocked soffit intake, and a ridge-to-soffit ventilation system that was never actually balanced. A repair without the fix means the same call again next winter, and we will tell you which one you are buying before the work starts.

Call (810) 588-3933

Storm checks: hail, wind and what we actually find on the roof

Dexter has had damaging-size hail several times since 2019, and that changes how a storm inspection here should be done. NOAA recorded one-inch hail at Dexter on March 14, 2019, June 12, 2021 and again on June 15, 2023 — and on that last date, 1.25-inch hail fell at nearby Hudson Mills and 1.75-inch hail at Delhi Mills the same day. One-inch hail does not usually cause a leak the week it falls. What it does is bruise the shingle mat — a soft spot where granules are knocked loose and the asphalt beneath is fractured — and that bruise turns into a failure point as the exposed asphalt weathers over the following seasons. From the ground it is invisible, which is why hail damage is often missed by homeowners or overstated by door-knockers.

A proper inspection checks test squares on each roof-facing direction by hand, feeling for soft spots and fractures rather than looking for them, because the damage is below the surface. Our inspectors are HAAG Certified, which is the credential that defines how hail and wind damage is actually identified and documented, and that cuts both ways — we will also tell you when what you are looking at is manufacturing blistering or ordinary granule loss rather than a storm claim.

The wind side of the record here is mostly trees: heavy oak and maple canopy along Huron River Drive and the lake chain comes down onto roofs in nearly every severe thunderstorm event logged for the area, including an August 27, 2024 event that also dropped 2.57 to 3.14 inches of rain over Dexter in a single storm. Intense rainfall exposes every reused pipe boot, every short ice barrier, and every woven valley that lacks a metal liner, and a good share of what gets described to us as wind damage turns out, once we are on the roof, to have been a volume-of-water leak through a detail that was never right to begin with.

Where a repair follows a storm and your insurer is involved, we document what we find on the roof with photographs and written findings, including the dates of the storms the damage relates to, and we talk to your adjuster about what we found. That is your claim and your relationship with your insurance company; what we do is make sure the adjuster sees the same thing we saw, with dates attached.

Repair now, or is it time for something bigger

Often the honest answer on a Dexter house is a repair, and we would rather tell you that than talk you into more work than the roof needs. As a general rule, a roof under about fifteen years old with damage confined to one area and a sound deck underneath is worth repairing outright. Once the age of the roof, the share of it affected, or the scope of what is actually failing pushes past that point, a repair stops being the right answer and starts becoming the first of several repeat calls.

That line matters most on Dexter's 1990s and 2000s subdivision stock, because those houses are arriving at the age where repeated small failures — a boot here, a sealant strip there, ridge cap lifting on one slope — start to add up to a roof that is telling you something bigger. We will say plainly when that is what we are looking at. If the deck underneath has already taken on water in more than one place, or if the shingles themselves are past the point where new material will match, a roof replacement in Dexter is the sounder move, and we will walk you through why rather than simply pushing the bigger job.

The reverse is just as true. A single run of pipe boots that have all failed together or ice dam damage confined to one eave on an otherwise sound roof are cases where a focused repair is the right answer and a full tear-off would be unnecessary. We inspect first, tell you honestly which situation you are in, and put the scope in writing before anyone touches a shingle.

Where we work in and around Dexter

Located 35 minutes north in Howell, we provide repair services throughout the City of Dexter, Dexter Township, and surrounding Webster and Scio Township addresses. This includes the 1990s and 2000s subdivisions, the older village center, and the lakefront properties along Portage, Silver, Halfmoon, and North Lake.

Downtown Dexter
Baker Road
Central Street
Dexter-Ann Arbor Road
Huron River Drive
Dexter-Pinckney Road
North Territorial Road
Huron Farms
Dexter Crossing
Westridge of Dexter
Arlington Woods
Horseshoe Bend
Brass Creek
Carriage Hills
Portage Lake
Silver Lake
Halfmoon Lake
North Lake
Hudson Mills Metropark
Dexter Township
Webster Township
Scio Township

Frequently asked questions

My roof is from the late 1990s or early 2000s. Is a repair still worth it?

Often, yes. A majority of the City of Dexter was built between 1990 and 2009, and roofs from that wave typically have builder-grade shingles over thin decking, box vents and a single course of ice barrier — an assembly good for roughly seventeen to thirty-five years here. If the failure is isolated, a pipe boot, a section of sealant that released, a run of lifted ridge cap, repairing it is the right call. Once failures are showing up across the whole roof rather than in one spot, that is a different conversation, and we will say so honestly.

Why does my ceiling stain show up nowhere near where the roof is actually damaged?

Because water runs along the rafters and the decking before it drops straight down. A stain in the middle of a bedroom ceiling can trace back to a chimney twenty feet away, or a valley on the opposite slope. We trace the path from the attic backward rather than guessing from the stain, and we confirm the actual entry point before we scope the repair.

Do you repair chimney flashing on Dexter's older houses?

Yes, including on the pre-1940 houses along Baker, Central and Dexter-Ann Arbor Road. The usual cause is counter flashing that has worked loose, or mortar that has deteriorated. We check both before scoping the repair.

Can you just patch part of the roof, or does it need to match?

A partial repair is often the right call, and we do it regularly. The honest caveat is color: shingles fade with age, and a patch on a roof that is more than a few years old will likely be visible, especially on a front-facing slope. We will show you the match before anything goes on so the decision is yours.

How do ice dams get fixed, not just patched, in Dexter?

We treat the repair and the cause as two separate things. The repair addresses what the water already damaged — decking, underlayment, shingle courses, stained drywall. The fix addresses why it happened: sealing attic air leaks, correcting insulation at the eaves, clearing blocked soffit intake, and balancing ridge exhaust with real intake. Michigan code requires ice barrier to run at least 24 inches inside the exterior wall line; on Dexter's older homes and multi-stage lake cottages, we typically run further than that minimum.

Does Dexter actually get hail, or is that oversold?

It does — Dexter has had one-inch hail on several dates since 2019. NOAA recorded one-inch hail at Dexter on March 14, 2019, June 12, 2021 and June 15, 2023, with larger hail — 1.25 and 1.75 inches — at Hudson Mills and Delhi Mills on that last date. One-inch hail bruises the shingle mat without necessarily leaking right away, which is why it needs a hands-on inspection with test squares rather than a look from the ground. Our inspectors are HAAG Certified, the standard for identifying this kind of damage.

My shingles look fine after a windstorm. Should I still have the roof checked?

Yes. Wind commonly breaks the sealant bond between shingles without removing a single one — the tab lifts, flexes, and lays back down looking untouched from the driveway. It lifts freely under a hand once you're actually on the roof. Damage like this starts at the rakes, eaves and ridge before it reaches the open field, which is another reason a ground-level look misses it entirely.

I have a cottage on Portage or Silver Lake with additions built on over the years. Why does it leak where the roofs meet?

Those roofs were usually built up in stages over decades, which leaves three or four planes meeting at angles nobody originally designed for, plus dead valleys that collect standing water and leaves instead of shedding them. Ventilation over the later additions is also often minimal, which is exactly where ice dams form hardest. We open the specific trouble spot to see the real condition of the decking before scoping the repair, since a plank-decked cottage roof can't be fully assessed from outside.

Should I repair my roof or replace it?

It depends on age, how much of the roof is affected, and what the deck looks like underneath. A roof under about fifteen years old with isolated damage and a sound deck is usually worth repairing. Past that point, or once a repair would need to address several separate failures at once, replacement is often the more sound long-term move. We will tell you plainly which situation yours is, and if it's the bigger job, see [roof replacement in Dexter](/services/roof-replacement/roof-replacement-dexter-mi).