Roof inspection
An inspection is worth its cost when it answers a decision you are about to make — buying a house, filing a claim, or deciding whether this is the year.
What gets looked at
The field of the roof — granule loss, curling, cracking, blistering, and how uniform the wear is. Every transition: valleys, ridges, hips, and the flashing at walls, chimneys, skylights and vents. Penetrations for plumbing stacks and exhaust. Gutters, and whether they are carrying water away from the foundation or into it. And the underside, from the attic, which is where active leaks and old stains show most clearly.
After a storm
Wind and hail damage is not always visible from the ground and is not always obvious even from the roof. Hail bruises a shingle without removing it, and the damage shows up as accelerated ageing over the following years rather than as an immediate leak. Insurers generally have a filing window, so an inspection after a significant storm is time-sensitive in a way that a routine one is not.
This region gets storms coming off the ridge with force through the summer, and Loudoun, Prince William and western Maryland see hail often enough that a post-event inspection is a routine step rather than an unusual one.
Buying or selling
A general home inspection includes the roof, but usually from the ground or a ladder at the edge, and usually as one item among two hundred. A dedicated roof inspection produces something specific enough to negotiate with — an estimate of remaining life, a description of what is failing and where, and a written record dated before closing.