What on your roof is worn out, and what is just old

The parts of a roof age on different schedules, and on an older brick house some of those parts are original and others were rebuilt by an owner nobody on the street remembers. Enter when the house was built and what has been replaced, and it will sort the parts by where each one stands.

This is a place to start looking, not a diagnosis. It sets ages against the service lives roofers generally expect. A roof over a cool, vented attic can outlast the range; one over a hot, sealed-up attic can fall short of it by years. Weather and workmanship count for more than the year.

This runs entirely on your own screen. Nothing is sent, nothing is saved.

Enter the house, then mark the work

When was the house built? What is on the roof now?

What has already been replaced?

Leave a row on Original if that part was never replaced, or if a previous owner had it redone and took the paperwork when they moved. Unknown is an honest answer here.

Roof covering Flashing at walls, valleys and penetrations Underlayment and ice-and-water shield Gutters and downspouts Attic ventilation Skylights (if you have them) Chimney crown, cap and masonry (if you have them) Fascia and soffit Siding or exterior cladding Window seals

St. Louis put the gutter inside the roof. That is where it goes, and the yard is the one place you cannot see it from. Which is why flashing, not shingle, is the item most worth knowing the age of.

Tap to enlarge

1 Ridge caps. First to fatigue in a climate that swings hard in both directions.
2 The field. Thaw cycles work the covering harder than the calendar suggests.
3 Valleys. Litter holds water against the covering exactly where it should be leaving.
4 Flashing. The chimney, and where a lower roof runs into a brick wall.
5 The vent boot. A rubber part with a life measured in years, not decades.
6 Eaves and gutters. Refreezing and a plugged box gutter back water up under the edge.

Why a new shingle can be the youngest part of an old roof

When a roof is laid over the previous one, the surface is new and everything beneath it is whatever was there. On a brick house that has been re-covered twice the underlayment may be original. The visible part resets; the working part does not. That is why the page asks about underlayment separately, and why on many houses the honest answer is that nobody knows when the deck was last exposed.

Flashing works the same way, and on a brick house the counterflashing cut into the mortar is the piece most often kept. Sealing it is faster than recutting it, and it is done often enough that a roof from five years ago can be relying on metal from the fifties. If someone says the roof is recent, ask whether the chimney is.

Use this page

Reproduce or link to this freely, crediting meramecroofing.com. If it helps someone in Kirkwood or Chesterfield tell a gutter liner from a roof, it has done its work.

Holding quotes already? The quote comparison sets three of them side by side, row for row.