Roof repair
Roof Repair in Holly, Michigan
Holly has the oldest housing stock of any town we serve — one in five houses inside the village was standing before 1940 — and it sits far enough north to catch Flint's snow rather than Livingston County's. We repair leaks, ice dam damage, wind-lifted shingles and failed flashing across the village, the township, and the Rose and Groveland addresses that also mail as Holly.
Holly is a village inside Holly Township. Four separate building departments issue roof permits inside the 48442 ZIP, and two local historic districts can reach your shingle choice.
Why is a Holly roof repair different from one twenty miles south?
Three reasons, and all of them are specific to this town. First, the age: the median home inside the Village of Holly dates to 1981, but 20.1% of the village housing stock predates 1940 — roughly 2.7 times Oakland County's share and about three times Livingston County's. Pre-war houses mean steep pitches, real chimneys, cut-up valleys and a century of additions, and that is flashing work rather than shingle work. Second, the snow: the nearest full NOAA station is Flint Bishop at 52.1 inches a year against Howell's 33.2. Third, the paperwork: there are four separate building departments inside ZIP 48442, and if you are in either of the village's two local historic districts, a change to the exterior appearance of your roof needs a Certificate of Appropriateness before a building permit can be issued at all. Repairs still run the normal $350 to $1,500 band. It is everything around the repair that is different.
20.1%
Village of Holly housing built before 1940
52.1 in
Annual snowfall normal at Flint Bishop, 19 miles northwest
4
Separate building departments inside ZIP 48442
Nov 10, 2024
EF0 tornado through the village — roofing lost on several streets
Four building departments, one ZIP code, and no county backstop
Most Michigan counties run a building department that covers the townships. Oakland County does not — not for any of the four jurisdictions that share a Holly mailing address. The state's own Bureau of Construction Codes jurisdiction list marks the Village of Holly, Holly Township, Rose Township and Groveland Township all as LOCAL, meaning each one has its own program. That is four separate offices, four fee structures and four sets of hours inside a single ZIP.
The scale of the confusion: ZCTA 48442 covers about 85.85 square miles. The Village of Holly is 2.831 square miles and Holly Township is 34.455. Groveland Township's own hall, at 4695 Grange Hall Road, is addressed Holly, MI 48442 — a township hall with another township's mailing address is about as clear a demonstration as you will find.
The one department that publishes a complete residential fee schedule is Rose Township's, and it is run by an outside agency, Code Enforcement Services, out of Davisburg — a different town entirely. Its application has a dedicated "Roof" checkbox and a "Roof Pitch" field, so there is no ambiguity about whether roofing is permitted work there.
- Village of Holly — its own department, 504½ East Maple, (248) 634-9571; annual contractor registration required before any work starts
- Holly Township — its own department, 102 Civic Drive, (248) 634-9331; open late on Wednesdays
- Rose Township — permits handled by Code Enforcement Services in Davisburg, (248) 625-8480; $75 base plus $8 per $1,000 of value
- Groveland Township — its own department, 4695 Grange Hall Road, (248) 634-4152; $15 contractor registration
- Village permit fees are set by an auto-calculating online form rather than a published schedule — we get the figure in writing before you owe anything
The village requires annual contractor registration before anyone touches your roof
This one matters when you are comparing bids. The Village of Holly's building department states it plainly: contractors doing work in the Village of Holly must register with the Building and Code Enforcement department annually before performing any work. Not before final inspection — before starting.
So an out-of-town crew that showed up after a storm and is not registered with the village legally cannot begin. Rose and Groveland Townships each charge $15 for contractor registration as well. We register where registration is required, which is a boring thing to say and a genuinely useful one after a wind event, when the door-knockers arrive.
One more village detail worth knowing: a permit goes invalid if work has not started within 180 days, and a permit with no inspection requested in 180 days gets closed. Reopening a closed permit costs $75 and closed permits are not refundable. If you pulled a permit last spring and never got the work done, check its status before you assume it is still live.
Two historic districts, and they reach the roof
This is the biggest single difference between roofing in Holly and roofing anywhere else we work, and most contractors will not mention it until it is a problem.
The Village of Holly has two local historic districts, not one, both created effective September 7, 1993 under Village Code Section 155.06. District Number One is the downtown — properties along Saginaw Street, Battle Alley, Washington Street and Broad Street, 67 designated properties in all. District Number Two is residential, running primarily along East Maple Street and College Street on the east side of the village, with 52 designated properties.
Here is the part that trips people up: both districts are defined by individual property lists, not by a drawn boundary. You cannot tell from a map whether you are in one. You have to check the address list. And the ordinance's definition of a resource explicitly includes privately owned buildings and non-historic buildings that happen to sit inside a district.
The village building permit application itself carries a "Is this project located within the Holly Historic District?" checkbox and a local-agency sign-off line for historic review. That is not decorative. Section 155.08 says a permit is required before any work affecting the exterior appearance of a resource, that the Building Inspector refers the application immediately to the Historic District Commission, and that a permit shall not be issued and the work shall not proceed until the Commission has acted.
Where the line falls: maintenance versus work
The ordinance draws a clean distinction and it is worth understanding before you call anyone. Ordinary maintenance — keeping a resource in good condition through minor intervention that does not alter external appearance — is exempt. But the code is explicit that when a repair alters external appearance, it qualifies as work.
In plain terms: patching a few shingles in kind is maintenance. A full tear-off that changes the shingle color, profile or material is work affecting exterior appearance, and it needs a Certificate of Appropriateness before the building permit can issue.
The two routes have different costs and very different timelines. Administrative review is $50 and the application is due at least 10 days before the project starts, with two color copies. Full Historic District Review Commission review is $150, the application is due no later than 20 days before the meeting, the Commission meets on the second Thursday of every month at 6:00 PM at 504½ E. Maple, you submit ten color copies plus photographs and material samples, and you or your representative have to attend in person.
Twenty days before a meeting that happens once a month means that if you miss a cutoff you are waiting for the next cycle. Plan on several weeks, not several days. If your roof is actively leaking, say so — emergency work has its own path, and we would rather make that call with the village than have you wait out a review with water coming in.
What the Commission is actually applying
The standard is the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation, plus the village's own criterion on the general compatibility of design, arrangement, texture and materials. Standard 6 is the one that bites on roofs: deteriorated historic features are to be repaired rather than replaced, and where deterioration genuinely requires replacement, the new feature should match the old in design, color, texture and — where possible — materials.
Practically, that means if you have a slate, tile or metal roof on a designated property, the presumption runs strongly toward repairing it rather than converting to asphalt. Doing exterior work in a district without approval is a municipal civil infraction, running $50 for a first offense up to $500 for a fourth within a year.
The three National Register listings in town — the Downtown Holly Commercial District, the Holly Hotel on Battle Alley, and the Holly Union Depot on South Broad — are a separate thing entirely. National Register listing is honorific and places no restriction on a private owner spending private money. It is the local Chapter 155 districts that create binding review, and they are broader: the East Maple and College Street residential district is not a National Register district at all. Do not let anybody conflate the two.
The oldest housing stock we work on
Inside the Village of Holly the median year built is 1981, but medians hide the shape of this town. 20.1% of village housing — around 551 units — was built in 1939 or earlier. Add the 1940s and it is 20.8%. For comparison, Oakland County's pre-1940 share is 7.4%, Livingston County's is 6.4%, and Michigan statewide is 14.5%. One in five houses inside this village is pre-war, which is roughly three times the rate in our home county.
Work the arithmetic forward and 86.5% of village housing units were built before 2000 — meaning the structure is 26 years old or more. Holly Township, which is 65.4% single-family detached against the village's 58.1%, sits at 11.5% pre-1940 with 20.3% built in the 2000s. Two different problems again: the village is an old-house market, the township is an aging-first-roof market.
What pre-war housing means on a roof: steeper pitches, more planes, real masonry chimneys that need a cricket on the up-slope side and frequently do not have one, porch roofs tied into main runs at shallow angles, dormers added in three different eras, and knob-and-tube-era framing that was never designed for a ventilated attic. It is more labor per square and it is almost always the flashing rather than the field that failed.
The eight things we get called out for most in Holly:
- Chimney flashing and missing crickets on pre-war houses in and around the village
- Ice dam damage at eaves, over porches, and at low-slope additions
- Valley failure where an original roof meets a later addition at a mismatched pitch
- Step and counter flashing at wall junctions, usually reused from a previous re-roof
- Failed pipe boots on the 1990s and 2000s township stock
- Wind-lifted shingles along rakes and ridges after a downburst
- Limb strikes — the mechanism in nearly every NOAA report here
- Attic condensation dripping onto ceilings in old houses with no soffit intake at all
A tornado came through the village in 2024 and took roofing off named streets
We do not have to generalize about storm exposure in Holly. The National Weather Service wrote it down.
On November 10, 2024 at 6:56 PM, an EF0 tornado with peak winds estimated at 70 mph tracked 1.23 miles, 50 yards wide, from wooded marshland southwest of town straight into the Village of Holly, dissipating just east of the center of town near Martha and Washington. The survey narrative names the streets: sporadic concentrated small tree and large limb damage, loss of roofing material on several facilities, construction site damage, and minor siding and fascia loss along portions of Tenny, Legrande, Sherman, Saginaw, Church, Martha and Washington Streets.
Six months later, on May 15, 2025, a 70 mph thunderstorm gust laid down what the NWS described as a swath of uprooted and downed trees from downtown Holly to the Holly Village Mobile Home Park. That gust was one of only five recorded at or above 60 knots anywhere in Oakland County across the entire 2020 to 2026 period. Holly is on that short list.
| Date | Event | What was reported |
|---|---|---|
| November 10, 2024 | EF0 tornado through the village | Loss of roofing material on several facilities plus siding and fascia loss on Tenny, Legrande, Sherman, Saginaw, Church, Martha and Washington Streets |
| May 15, 2025 | 70 mph gust at Holly | A swath of uprooted and downed trees from downtown Holly to Holly Village Mobile Home Park |
| February 22, 2023 | Ice storm | $11,000,000 across Oakland County — a quarter to a half inch of ice along and south of I-69, the corridor Holly sits on |
| August 27, 2024 | 66 mph gust at Holly | More than a dozen trees blown down between Holly and the Oakland/Genesee county line |
| July 11, 2022 | EF0 tornado, Lake Fenton to Holly | $35,000 — peak damage in a backyard on Addis Road; a barn farther down the road lost some metal roofing |
| June 21, 2020 | 62 mph gust at Holly | Numerous large trees down on the north side of Holly; one fell onto a pickup truck |
Source: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database. Gust figures are National Weather Service estimates converted from knots.
Hail: the honest version
There has been no hail report inside the Village of Holly in the 2020 to 2026 record. The nearest Oakland County stone was 1.00 inch at Rose Center on February 18, 2026, about 4.7 miles out — and on the same day, nine minutes apart, 1.00 inch fell at Parshallville in Livingston County, also 4.7 miles out. Quarter-size hail on both sides of town at once.
The genuinely large hail near Holly skews north into Genesee County, not south. The July 20, 2023 Davison supercell dropped baseball-size stones, 2.75 inches, with the NWS noting widespread hail damage across Davison including car and house damage — but that was seventeen miles away. Goodrich took 1.25 inches in May 2024, about eight miles out.
So Holly does see more, and closer, hail than the Livingston County core does. It is just that the size distribution here runs 0.75 to 1.25 inches, and the stones big enough to bruise a shingle mat stay north of you. If a salesman is selling a Holly hail claim, ask which date and which report he is working from.
You are on the Flint side of the snow line
This is the fact that separates Holly from every other town we serve, and it is measurable. The nearest full NOAA climate station is Flint Bishop International, nineteen miles northwest, with an annual snowfall normal of 52.1 inches. Detroit Metro, about fifty miles southeast, normals 45.0 inches. Howell, twenty-five miles southwest, comes in at 33.2 inches. Flint gets 57% more snow than Howell and 16% more than Detroit Metro, and Holly sits closer to Flint than to either.
The monthly shape is the punishing part: 15.1 inches in January, 13.0 in February, 11.4 in December. Flint records about 46.8 days a year with measurable snow, 16.0 days with an inch or more, and 4.1 days with three inches or more.
It also sits on the I-69 corridor, and if you read National Weather Service winter storm narratives for this region you will notice how often that corridor gets named. The December 2022 winter storm dropped two to six inches across Oakland County "with the highest amounts occurring along and around the I-69 corridor where isolated higher amounts around 8 inches were reported."
Freeze-thaw is the mechanism, not the total. Flint records about 140.8 nights a year at or below freezing and about 50.8 days that never rise above it, which leaves roughly 90 days a year when the roof deck crosses 32°F in both directions inside twenty-four hours. That cycling is what builds an ice dam, breaks a sealant bond and works flashing loose.
Michigan code requires an ice barrier from the lowest edge of every roof surface to at least 24 inches inside the exterior wall line. On this side of the county, on a pre-war house with deep overhangs and an attic that was never designed to breathe, we treat that as the minimum it is and usually run two full courses.
The lakes, the state parks, and the oak that lands on your roof
Holly is ringed by public land. Holly State Recreation Area covers roughly 8,000 acres in Groveland Township with Heron, Valley, Wildwood and Crotched Lakes inside it — worth noting that the DNR has critical dam repairs significantly lowering water levels at Heron, Valley and Wildwood through October 2026. Seven Lakes State Park sits a mile northwest of the village in Holly Township, 1,434 acres with over 230 acres of water.
Seven Lakes has the better story. There were originally seven separate lakes. In 1967 developers dammed Swartz Creek to merge them into one large body they called Decoup Lake. The development failed, Michigan bought the property in 1969, and the park opened in 1977 — and the USGS still classifies Seven Lakes as a reservoir rather than a lake. Big Seven is 170 acres and Dickinson is 44.
Closer in, within two miles of the village, sit Bevins Lake, Simonson Lake, Bush Lake, Rice Lake, Stiffs Mill Pond, Lake Mauna Loa, Arrowhead Lake, Tooley Lake, Drake Lake and Lake Oahu. The Shiawassee River rises about seven miles from here at Shiawassee Lake, which makes Holly one of the first towns on it — and Water Works Park in the village is the launch site for the Shiawassee River Heritage Water Trail, a designated National Water Trail.
All of that is oak-hickory country: black, red, white and bur oaks, shagbark and pignut hickories, black cherry, black walnut and red maple, on glacial moraine. We are not going to quote you a canopy percentage because none exists for Holly, and we are not going to claim there is a local tree removal permit because we could not find one. What we can point at is the storm record, which keeps saying the same thing: numerous large trees down, 10 to 12 inch limbs down, a swath of uprooted trees from downtown to the mobile home park. Mature oak standing over pre-war roofs is the local damage mechanism, and trimming coordination is a real part of a Holly maintenance plan.
Where we work in and around Holly
Holly is about forty-five minutes north of our yard in Howell, up through Fenton and across the county line. We work the pre-war streets in the village and both local historic districts, the Riverside developments clustered within about a mile of downtown, the lake communities out toward Seven Lakes and Holly Recreation Area, and the Rose and Groveland addresses that also mail as Holly. Holly Area Schools serves about 3,157 students across the village and parts of five townships, which is close to the footprint we cover here.
- Downtown Holly
- Battle Alley
- East Maple Street
- College Street
- The Preserve of Riverside
- The Gardens of Riverside
- The Woodlands of Riverside
- The Villas of Riverside
- Riverside North
- Orchard Valley Village
- Stonebridge of Holly
- Deer Lake Village
- Woodland Meadows
- Minnock Estates
- Highland Acres
- North Ridge
- Holly Pines
- Hollywood
- Holly Manor
- Holly Bush Shores
- Holly Shores
- Holly View
- Bevins Lake Estates
- Crescent Park
- Riviera Shores
- Lakeside Homesites
- Maplefield
- Creque Woods
- Five Points
- Rose Center
- Groveland Corners
- Davisburg
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