Roof replacement
Roof Replacement in Novi, Michigan
Novi is the rare southeast Michigan town where the roofing question is simple to state and easy to get wrong. Almost forty percent of the housing here went up in the 1990s and 2000s, which means an enormous share of the city is arriving at its first full tear-off at the same time, on builder-grade shingles that were never meant to be the last roof the house would wear. There is one building department, one set of construction hours, and — in most subdivisions — an association with something to say about the color. We replace roofs across Novi with a full tear-off, a complete Owens Corning system and a registered warranty, and we handle the association paperwork with you rather than leaving it in your lap.
Serving the City of Novi in Oakland County — one city, one building department, and a lot of 1990s and 2000s subdivisions arriving at a first tear-off.
Do I need a permit to replace my roof in Novi?
Novi is one incorporated city with no township or county overlay, so if a permit is required it comes from exactly one place: the City of Novi Community Development Department, Building Division, on the first floor of the Civic Center at 45175 Ten Mile Road, open Monday through Friday from 8:00 to 5:00. What the city does not publish anywhere is a residential re-roof handout — there is a commercial re-roofing requirements form, and a general residential building permit application, but no line that says a like-for-like shingle replacement does or does not need one. We are not going to guess in either direction on a page you might rely on. Before we start, we call the Building Division at (248) 347-0415, confirm what your specific job requires, and pull it if it is required. One caution worth knowing: a Novi mailing address or Novi schools does not always mean a Novi address. Some homes sit in Northville, Lyon or Commerce Township, and their permits are not Novi's — we confirm which office covers your parcel on the estimate visit.
1993
Median year a Novi home was built — the youngest housing stock of any town we serve
39.5%
Of Novi homes built in the 1990s and 2000s — the first-tear-off cohort
100+
Homeowner associations listed in the city's own HOA directory
25 psf
Ground snow load for all of Oakland County, Novi included
One city, one building department — and the edges that are not Novi
Novi organized as a township in 1832 and incorporated as a city on February 24, 1969. Since then it has been a single jurisdiction. There is no township building office layered over part of it and no county office handling a corner of it the way Tyrone or Scio get handled elsewhere. Everything comes through Community Development at the Civic Center on Ten Mile Road.
That makes Novi simpler than most of the towns we work in, with one asterisk. The city's borders do not line up neatly with mailing addresses or school district boundaries, and a handful of neighborhoods that everyone calls Novi are not in the City of Novi at all — North Hills, for one, carries a Northville 48167 address. There are other edges toward Lyon and Commerce Townships. We do not guess which ones from a list; we confirm the jurisdiction for your parcel before any paperwork is filed, because filing in the wrong office wastes a week and tells you nothing about your roof.
On the code itself there is no ambiguity. Michigan sets the residential code statewide, and one- and two-family homes are still built to the 2015 Michigan Residential Code. The 2021 residential code was filed in May 2025 with an effective date that August, and a Court of Claims order in July 2025 paused it while the Home Builders Association of Michigan lawsuit proceeds; as of now the 2015 book governs your roof. Commercial work moved to the 2021 Michigan Building Code on May 1, 2025. Ground snow load across Oakland County, Novi included, is 25 pounds per square foot.
Hours we can be on your roof
Novi is specific about this where most towns are vague. City Code Section 22-98 permits construction between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday and prohibits it on Sundays and on legal holidays — New Year's Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. There are narrow exceptions for an owner working on their own occupied home, for sites with no occupied dwelling within a thousand feet, and for emergencies.
In practice that gives us a twelve-hour window six days a week, which is more than enough to take a typical Novi colonial off and back on in a single day. It also means that if a Friday job runs into weather, Saturday is available to us and Sunday is not. We tell you that up front rather than showing up on a Sunday morning and finding out what the neighbors think about Section 22-98.
Inspections and online filing
Novi has run an online portal for scheduling construction inspections since 2012, and the city site links it directly. What the city does not publish is which inspections a residential re-roof requires, or whether a roofing permit can be applied for online rather than at the counter. We find that out by phone for your job rather than printing a process on a web page that may not match what the Building Division tells us this month. Either way, scheduling the inspection and meeting the inspector is our job, not yours.
Novi's housing is young, and that is exactly why it is due
Novi grew from 9,668 people in 1970 to 22,525 in 1980 to 47,386 in 2000 and about 66,000 today, with Twelve Oaks Mall in 1977 usually credited as the switch. That growth curve is written into the roofs. This is the youngest housing stock of any town we serve, and almost none of it is old: under five percent of Novi homes predate 1960.
| Built | Share of Novi housing | Where that roof stands today |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 or later | 2.1% | Original roof, decades of life left |
| 2010s | 15.0% | First roof, mid-life |
| 2000s | 20.1% | First roof at or near the end of it |
| 1990s | 19.4% | First roof past due, or a 2010s replacement |
| 1980s | 16.9% | On a second roof now |
| 1970s | 18.8% | Second or third covering, often at the layer limit |
| 1960s and earlier | 7.7% | The lakefront and the oldest corners of the city |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 five-year estimates, City of Novi. Median year built 1993; 28,351 housing units; 66.3% owner-occupied; 49.8% single-family detached and 12.2% single-family attached.
Which subdivision you live in tells us which roof you have
The 1970s stock clusters toward Meadowbrook and Haggerty and the Ten Mile corridor — Village Oaks, Meadowbrook Glens, Turtle Creek, Whispering Meadows, Carriage Hill. The 1980s added Orchard Ridge Estates, Dunbarton Pines, Jamestowne Green, Briarwood, Deerbrook and Roma Ridge. Those homes are on a second or third covering and are the ones most likely to be at Michigan's two-layer limit, where a layover is not legal regardless of what anyone tells you at the lumber yard.
The 1990s executive subdivisions are the heart of today's replacement market, and most of them sit between Eight Mile and Eleven Mile from Beck Road east to Taft: Royal Crown, Greenwood Oaks, Addington Park, Walden Woods, Yerkes Manor, Barclay Estates, Bradford of Novi, Chase Farms, Mystic Forest, Autumn Park, Beckenham, Windridge Place, Wintergreen Park, Yorkshire Place, Cheltenham Estates. Then the 2000s wave: Island Lake of Novi, built from 1999 through 2015 and the largest of them all, with its own sub-associations at the Arbors, North Bay, the Orchards, the Preserves, the Reserves, the Shores, South Harbor, the Vineyards and the Woods; Willowbrook Farms; Churchill Crossing; Tuscany Reserve; Bellagio; Maybury Park Estates; Deer Run.
Those are not just names. A 1994 Barclay Estates colonial and a 2009 Island Lake home need different conversations — one about a deck that has carried a roof for thirty years and an attic that was never properly vented, the other about whether the original roof is genuinely failing or whether one wind-damaged slope is the whole story.
The 1990s and 2000s together are 39.5 percent of the city — roughly four homes in ten. Those homes were roofed the way subdivision homes were roofed in that era: a twenty- or twenty-five-year builder-grade shingle over 7/16-inch OSB, gable vents at each end with a handful of box vents, one course of ice barrier at the eave, and no drip edge at the rakes, which Michigan did not require until 2012. At twenty-five to thirty-five years old, in a climate with 25 psf of snow and a freeze-thaw cycle that runs all winter, that assembly is done. It is usually still watertight the day we look at it, and that is not the test.
The replacement is where every one of those shortcuts gets corrected: drip edge at eaves and rakes, ice barrier run the full code distance past the interior wall line, gable vents sealed and a ridge vent fed by real soffit intake with baffles in every rafter bay, new flashings rather than reused ones, and every sheet of OSB checked for edge swell and delamination with the old roof off and the deck in daylight.
Condominiums, site condos and the association
Novi is condo-heavy in a way its neighbors are not. Single-family detached homes are 49.8 percent of the housing stock and attached single-family another 12.2 percent — about 3,466 units — with the balance in multi-unit buildings. The city's own directory lists more than a hundred homeowner and condominium associations, from Tollgate Woods, Pioneer Meadows and Settler's Creek to Lochmoor Village, Connemara Hills, Simmons Orchard, Meadowbrook Lake, Country Place Condominiums, the Villas at Stonebrook, the Towns at Liberty Park, Summerlin and Lenox Park.
The first question on an attached-condo roof is not what shingle you want. It is who owns the roof. Under Michigan condominium practice, the roof of an attached condominium is usually a general common element that the association maintains, while a detached site condominium usually puts the roof on the individual owner — but the master deed controls, and master deeds are not identical. Novi has a great many site condominiums that look and feel exactly like subdivisions. We read your master deed and bylaws before we write anything down, so nobody discovers after the fact that they paid for a roof the association was responsible for, or waited on an association that was never responsible at all.
Color and style approval, handled by us
Where the roof is yours, the association usually still has a say in what it looks like. Architectural guidelines vary from one Novi subdivision to the next, and we are not going to tell you what your particular association's rules are — we read them with you. What we do for every Novi homeowner who needs it is assemble the submission: the exact Owens Corning product, the shingle line, the specific color name, the manufacturer's product sheet and a physical sample board if the committee wants to see one. You submit it or we send it in with you, and the order does not go in until the approval is back.
The practical reason to start that early is lead time. An architectural committee that meets monthly can add weeks to a schedule that would otherwise be a single day of work. We ask about your association at the estimate, not the week before the crew is due.
The whole-street conversation
In a subdivision where every house went up in the same three years, roofs come due in the same three years. We are often on a Novi street for a second and third house within a season, and there is a real advantage in that for you: the crew already knows the deck, the pitch, the vent layout and the association's approval path. If neighbors are asking, we will inspect and quote each house on its own merits — no bundled arrangement and no pressure — but the scheduling gets easier.
Walled Lake, Shawood and Novi's only old housing
Novi has 1.05 square miles of water inside its 31.29 square miles, and the piece that matters for roofing is the northeast corner. Walled Lake covers 670 acres with a maximum depth of 53 feet, lies partly in Novi and partly in the City of Walled Lake, and is the headwater of the Middle Branch of the Rouge River. Lakeshore Park sits on the Novi shore off South Lake Drive. Just southwest is Shawood Lake and the Shawood–Walled Lake Heights area of older cottage-era lots.
That shoreline is Novi's exception to everything the census table says. While the rest of the city is 1990s subdivisions, the Walled Lake and Shawood lots are the genuinely old, genuinely irregular housing — cottages that became year-round homes one addition at a time, with low-slope shed roofs tacked onto steep original gables, dead valleys where an addition met the old roof, multiple layers of asphalt, and rooflines no builder ever drew on a plan. They also take the weather first: 670 acres of open water gives a west or northwest wind a clean run at north- and west-facing slopes.
A lakefront replacement here is the moment to reconcile all of that. Anything under a 2:12 pitch gets a membrane rather than shingles, because shingles are not a roofing material at that slope no matter how carefully they are laid. Sections between 2:12 and 4:12 get double underlayment. Dead valleys get crickets so water leaves instead of standing. The water-facing elevation gets rake starter and the manufacturer's high-wind fastening pattern instead of the four-nail code minimum. And the deck under a cottage roof is usually plank rather than sheathing, which we will not know for certain until the tear-off — so we set out at the estimate, in writing, exactly how deck replacement is handled if we find it, before you are standing in the driveway looking at an open roof.
Island Lake and the man-made water
Island Lake of Novi, built between 1999 and 2015, is a lake subdivision of a completely different kind — newer homes, engineered water, and roofs that are original or on a first replacement. The exposure conversation there is not about a century of additions; it is about which slopes face the open water and whether the original builder's ventilation ever balanced. Most of Novi drains to the Rouge, while the western edge of the city drains toward the Huron.
Novi's storm record: wind and limbs, not hail
We get asked about hail in Novi constantly, usually by homeowners who just had a knock on the door. The National Weather Service record is unusually clear on this one, so here it is.
| Date | Event | What was reported |
|---|---|---|
| July 7, 2021 | 56 mph estimated at Novi | Multiple large trees uprooted; wires down on I-275 at Grand River |
| July 24, 2021 | 61–62 mph estimated at Walled Lake | Large oak trees reported down on residential homes, with damage from Haggerty to Halsted |
| June 16, 2022 | 56 mph estimated at Novi | Numerous trees blown down, snapped and uprooted in and around the Novi Town Center |
| August 24, 2023 | 50 mph at Novi | Eight-inch limbs down; the same night's line hit 70 mph at South Lyon |
| August 27, 2024 | 56 mph estimated at Novi | Multiple trees and limbs down |
| June 24, 2025 | 56 mph estimated at Novi | Two large spruce trees uprooted; one-inch hail the same day at Wixom, none logged at Novi |
| March 13, 2026 | 54 mph measured, non-thunderstorm high wind | County-wide synoptic wind event |
Source: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database, and National Weather Service Detroit event pages. No hail was logged at Novi itself between 2016 and 2026, and no tornado was logged at Novi in that period.
Read down that column and the pattern is the same every time: trees and limbs. Novi's roof damage is wind-and-tree damage, and the wind that does it is in the 50 to 62 mph range, not the triple digits. Hail at Novi itself is simply absent from the record for the whole decade — the nearest stones were an inch at Wixom in June 2025, and larger hail at Wixom and South Lyon back in 2017 and 2019. No tornado has been logged at Novi in that period either; the April 2026 outbreak that produced five tornadoes across southeast Michigan left Oakland County with one downed limb near Davisburg.
The September 2–3, 2026 windstorm brought 60 to 70 mph straight-line winds across the region and roughly 300,000 outages, with an EF-2 on Detroit's east side. The nearest damage reports to Novi were at Milford, Commerce and West Bloomfield — where a very large limb went through a section of a house roof — and there was no Novi-specific report on the event page at all. If someone tells you your Novi roof was destroyed in a storm, the useful question is which report they are reading. We will look at it for free either way.
For the roof itself, 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 goes on with starter shingles at both the eaves and the rakes — a wide margin over anything in that table. On the Walled Lake shoreline and the open western subdivisions off Beck and Wixom Roads we fasten to the manufacturer's high-wind pattern rather than the code minimum. And because a shingle's sealant strip is heat-activated, bonding in about a day in July heat and taking up to twelve weeks on a shaded north slope in the cold, a Novi roof finished by mid-October is sealed before the November wind arrives.
The Owens Corning system we register in Novi
On Top Roofing is an Owens Corning Platinum Preferred Contractor — the top tier of the Owens Corning contractor network in the company's own words, and the only tier that can register its best system warranty. We are also BBB A+ accredited, and our inspectors are HAAG Certified.
Every Novi replacement is registered under a Platinum Protection Roofing Limited Warranty in your name: limited lifetime coverage on materials with a 50-year non-prorated period, limited lifetime workmanship non-prorated for the first 25 years, 130 mph wind resistance as standard and 160 mph enhanced, and 25-year algae resistance when Owens Corning hip-and-ridge is used. It transfers once to a buyer within 60 days of a sale, which matters in a market where Novi homes turn over as often as they do.
The warranty requires the whole system, not just the shingle: Duration shingles with SureNail Technology, Owens Corning or approved synthetic underlayment, Owens Corning hip-and-ridge, self-adhered ice-and-water barrier, starter at eaves and rakes, and VentSure balanced ventilation. We install all of it as standard on every Novi roof, along with new flashings and new drip edge at every edge.
Colors for Novi houses
The 1990s brick-and-vinyl colonials between Eight Mile and Eleven Mile sit well under Driftwood, Teak, Brownwood and Estate Gray. The 2000s stone-and-stucco elevations at Island Lake, Tuscany Reserve and Bellagio usually want the Duration Designer line — Aged Copper, Storm Cloud, Black Sable — which reads deeper and more dimensional from the street. The 1970s ranches and quad-levels toward Meadowbrook take Onyx Black or Slatestone Gray. On the exposed Walled Lake elevations we will often suggest Duration FLEX, the SBS polymer-modified shingle with a UL 2218 Class 4 impact rating. We bring full-size samples to the estimate, and if your association needs a board, we bring that too.
A Howell company, about thirty minutes down I-96
We are going to be straight about where we come from, because it is the first thing a careful Novi homeowner checks. Our yard is at 5896 Sterling Drive in Howell — about 29 miles and half an hour from the Novi Civic Center, a single straight run east on I-96 to the Wixom, Beck or Novi Road exits. We are not a Novi storefront and we are not pretending to be one.
What that distance actually buys you is the same thing it buys Milford and South Lyon, both of which are closer to Novi than we are and both of which we work constantly. These are in-house crews, not a rotating cast of subcontracted labor assembled for whichever town had a storm. The same foreman who ran your neighbor's tear-off in South Lyon runs yours. Material comes off the truck the morning of the job, the container goes on your driveway on plywood, the crew works the city's seven-to-seven window, and a magnet goes over the lawn and the beds before anyone leaves.
It also means we are not going anywhere after the storm season ends. A limited lifetime workmanship warranty is only worth the company standing behind it, and a company that has worked out of the same Livingston County yard for years is a different proposition from a truck with an out-of-state plate parked at the end of your street in September.
Insurance claims, honestly described
When a limb comes through a Novi roof, there is usually a claim. Our HAAG Certified inspectors document what we find — photographs, measurements, slope-by-slope notes and the storm date from the National Weather Service record — and we give you that documentation and speak to your adjuster on site about the scope of the damage. We do not file the claim for you and we do not represent you with your insurer; that relationship is yours. What we can do is make sure the adjuster is looking at the same evidence we are.
Novi neighborhoods where we replace roofs
From our yard at 5896 Sterling Dr in Howell, Novi is about thirty minutes east on I-96. We replace roofs across the city — the 1990s executive subdivisions between Eight Mile and Eleven Mile, the 2000s neighborhoods at Island Lake and Churchill Crossing, the 1970s and 1980s streets toward Meadowbrook and Haggerty, the condominium and site-condo communities in the city's HOA directory, and the older lots along Walled Lake and Shawood.
- Island Lake of Novi
- Walled Lake shoreline
- Shawood Lake
- Village Oaks
- Meadowbrook Glens
- Turtle Creek
- Whispering Meadows
- Carriage Hill
- Orchard Ridge Estates
- Dunbarton Pines
- Jamestowne Green
- Briarwood
- Deerbrook
- Roma Ridge
- Royal Crown
- Greenwood Oaks
- Addington Park
- Walden Woods
- Yerkes Manor
- Barclay Estates
- Bradford of Novi
- Chase Farms
- Mystic Forest
- Autumn Park
- Beckenham
- Windridge Place
- Wintergreen Park
- Yorkshire Place
- Cheltenham Estates
- Willowbrook Farms
- Churchill Crossing
- Tuscany Reserve
- Bellagio
- Maybury Park Estates
- Deer Run
- Tollgate Woods
- Pioneer Meadows
- Settler's Creek
- Lochmoor Village
- Connemara Hills
- Liberty Park
- Novi Heights
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a permit to replace my roof in Novi?
What hours can your crew work in Novi?
My subdivision has an HOA. Who handles the approval?
I live in a condominium. Is the roof mine or the association's?
My house is from 1996 and the roof still looks fine. Is it really time?
Is Novi a hail town?
You are based in Howell. Is that a problem for a Novi job?
Can you replace the roof on a Walled Lake cottage with additions all over it?
What warranty comes with a Novi roof replacement?
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