Cedar Ridge Residence

The challenge

The homeowners called on a Tuesday about a single brown stain on a bedroom ceiling. They had lived with it for two winters and assumed it was condensation. Two  contractors had quoted a localised repair around the nearest vent. Water almost never enters where it appears. It travels along the underside of the deck, follows a rafter, and drops wherever gravity finally wins. The actual entry point in this house was nine feet uphill of the stain, at a valley where the original installer had run the shingles across without a proper valley membrane underneath.

What we did

The inspection told us enough to recommend a full tear-off rather than a repair, and the homeowners agreed to the contingency stated in the estimate. Once the roof was off, the scale became clear: thirty-one sheets of sheathing had softened past the point of holding a fastener, there was no ice and water barrier at the eaves at all, and the attic had been venting into itself for roughly a decade because the previous crew had installed a ridge vent with no intake at the soffits to feed it. We replaced the deck, laid a proper self-adhering membrane at the eaves and through every valley, ran synthetic underlayment across the field, and rebuilt the ventilation as a balanced system rather than an exhaust vent with nothing behind it.

The result

Dried in on day one, finished on day three, and closed out with the full photo record. Attic humidity measured roughly half its previous level at the six-month check. The homeowners now have photographs of what was under their roof, which is the part they mention when they recommend us.

“They found rot three other companies missed, showed me photographs of it, and did not change the price when they fixed it. That is the whole review.”