Roof Replacement in Ann Arbor, Michigan

Four offices for one mailing address

Ann Arbor is a city of 122,000 surrounded by townships that share its name, its schools and its post office but not its building department. Getting this wrong is the most common way an Ann Arbor roofing job starts badly, so we settle it first.

On the city side, one detail is worth stating plainly because it is published in writing: Ann Arbor enforces the 2021 Michigan Building Code for commercial work as of May 1, 2025, and the city's own codes page says the residential code will remain the 2015 Michigan Residential Code until the State of Michigan adopts an updated one. The 2021 residential code was filed in May 2025 and then paused by a Court of Claims order that July while the Home Builders Association of Michigan litigation runs. Your house is built to the 2015 book.

Inspections in the city are requested through STREAM by whoever is listed as the permit contact — us, on our jobs. They run Monday through Friday from 8 to 4, next-day requests have to be in by 2:30 p.m., and the inspector gives a two- or four-hour window on the morning of. That is our scheduling problem to manage, not yours.

On snow load we will be careful. Michigan's residential code table puts Washtenaw County at 25 pounds per square foot with an exception list of jurisdictions at 20, and we check which figure applies to your address against the table rather than quoting one from memory.

An old city, young townships

The census tells two different stories here, and both of them matter for roofing.

The city is old and mixed. Its largest single block is the 1960s and 1970s at 33.7 percent — ranches, colonials and split-levels in Lansdowne, Orchard Hills, Dicken and the neighborhoods off Stadium and Packard, now on a second or third covering. Another 29.8 percent predates 1960, including the 14.8 percent built before 1940 that fills the Old West Side, Water Hill, the Old Fourth Ward, Kerrytown, Burns Park and Northside. Only 17.2 percent of the city went up in the 1990s and 2000s.

The townships are the opposite. Pittsfield's median home was built in 1994, with 29.1 percent from the 1990s and 19.1 percent from the 2000s; Scio's median is also 1994, with 28.3 percent from the 2000s and 81.9 percent owner-occupied; Ann Arbor Township's median is 1989. Those are first-tear-off markets in the same shape as Fenton Township — builder-grade shingles over OSB, gable-and-box venting, one course of ice barrier, no rake drip edge before 2012, and now twenty-five to thirty-five years old. Lake Forest in northwest Pittsfield, built 1993 to 2001, is a textbook example; so are Stonebridge, Polo Fields and Loch Alpine on the Scio side toward Dexter.

Ann Arbor's storm record: this one is a hail town

We tell homeowners in most of the towns we serve that hail is not their problem. Ann Arbor is the exception, and the record is long enough to be worth reading carefully.

The April 15, 2026 tornado is the event most Ann Arbor homeowners will remember. It touched down at 1:44 a.m. near Jackson Avenue and I-94, crossed the interstate into Veterans Memorial Park where it snapped stadium light poles and damaged the ice arena wall and roof, tracked through the neighborhoods to Virginia Park where a building north of Bach Elementary lost a portion of its roof, and lifted near West William and Fourth. It was 500 yards wide with a peak wind of 110 mph, about 40 utility poles came down, the schools closed, and straight-line winds behind it stripped metal roof panels off Yost Ice Arena. Michigan Stadium measured 61 mph. Nobody was hurt. It was one of five tornadoes across southeast Michigan that night.

The September 2–3, 2026 windstorm brought 60 to 70 mph straight-line winds across the region and roughly 300,000 outages. Washtenaw County's reports were west of the city — trees and power lines down at Hudson Mills, and trees down at Jackson and Zeeb Roads in Scio Township — with no report logged inside city limits.

Because hail here is real, a hail inspection here is worth doing properly. Our inspectors are HAAG Certified, which means the assessment is against a published standard: test squares on each slope, bruising and mat fracture distinguished from blistering and normal granule loss, collateral evidence on soft metals, vents and gutters, and the storm date matched to the National Weather Service record. That is what an adjuster is trained to look for, and it is the difference between a documented claim and a door-knocker's opinion. If your roof has been under one-and-a-half-inch stones twice since 2020, it is worth having someone qualified go up there.

For the new roof, Owens Corning Duration shingles carry a 130 mph wind resistance limited warranty as standard and a 160 mph enhanced warranty when the full component set is installed with starter at both eaves and rakes. Where hail is a recurring fact rather than a rumor, we will often recommend Duration FLEX — the SBS polymer-modified shingle with a UL 2218 Class 4 impact rating — and Ann Arbor is the page where we mean it. Some insurers offer a premium consideration for a Class 4 roof; that is a question for your carrier, and we will give you the product documentation to ask with.

Getting to Ann Arbor, and working there

Our yard is at 5896 Sterling Drive in Howell — about 32 miles and thirty-five minutes down US-23 to Ann Arbor City Hall, and a little less to the township hall. The same crews work Whitmore Lake, which sits directly between us on US-23, along with Pinckney and South Lyon. These are in-house crews rather than subcontracted labor assembled after a storm, which is the only way a limited lifetime workmanship warranty means anything.

Ann Arbor has a few working realities we plan around. The Art Fair takes over downtown in July and brings something like half a million people into the center of the city — in 2019 a 50 mph gust blew the tents down and injured someone, which tells you what that week is like. Football Saturdays move traffic in ways that do not respect a delivery schedule. Narrow older streets in the Old West Side and Burns Park often mean the container cannot go where it would go in a subdivision, so we plan placement at the estimate and get whatever permission the street requires ahead of time rather than on the morning.

When a limb comes through an Ann Arbor roof — and in this canopy it does — our HAAG Certified inspectors document the damage, photograph it slope by slope, tie it to the National Weather Service storm date and speak to your adjuster on site about scope. We do not file the claim for you and we do not represent you with your insurer; that relationship stays yours. What we do is make sure everyone is looking at the same evidence.