A roof is a system, not just shingles.

Most roofs here do not fail at the shingles

When a roof starts letting water in, the shingle field is usually the part that is still fine. The water is coming in somewhere the shingles were never doing the work in the first place — the step flashing up the side of a chimney, a valley where two roof planes dump into each other, or a plumbing vent boot whose rubber collar has gone hard and split.

Those boots are worth knowing about. The rubber typically starts cracking around the ten to fifteen year mark, well before the shingles are done — which is why a roof can be leaking while the shingles still look perfectly healthy from the ground.

Ventilation is the part nobody sells you

A roof needs to breathe in at the soffit and out at the ridge, and the two have to be roughly in balance. Plenty of houses around here have a ridge vent cut in but blocked or missing intake below, so the attic just bakes. Hot trapped air cooks the shingles from underneath and shortens their life, and in winter the same poor airflow is what starts ice at the eaves.

It is invisible from the driveway, it is not exciting to talk about, and it is the difference between a roof that reaches its rated life and one that does not. We would rather spend ten minutes in your attic than quote a roof without looking.

How to tell whether a storm actually did damage

Storm damage is rarely a hole you can see from the ground. Wind can lift and crease shingles without tearing them off, and a crease is a failure point even though the shingle is still up there. Hail bruises the surface and knocks the granules loose without leaving an obvious puncture.

The easiest tell is at eye level: dented gutters, downspouts or window screens usually mean the hail hit hard enough to have done something to the roof as well. Look for shingles that seem darker, dented or shiny in patches. If you are unsure, we will come and look and tell you honestly — it is a free, no-pressure inspection, and sometimes the answer is that your roof is fine.

We replace roofs. We do not patch them.

Worth saying plainly, because it saves everyone a phone call: Sunshine does full roof replacements, including emergency replacements. We are not the company to ring about swapping out a few shingles on one slope.

That is deliberate. Patching a section of an ageing roof buys you a season or two and leaves you with two different roofs on one house, of different ages, meeting at a seam. If your roof is near the end of its life, a partial fix is usually money spent twice. If it genuinely is a small isolated problem on an otherwise young roof, we will tell you that too — and tell you that you want a repair outfit, not us.

What drives the price of a roof replacement

Anyone who quotes a roof over the phone is guessing. The number moves on things that are only knowable on site: how steep the pitch is, how many layers have to come off, what condition the decking underneath is in once it is exposed, and how much cutting the roof shape demands. A simple gable is a different job from something with four dormers, two valleys and a chimney.

What we will do is measure it, tell you what we find, and leave you with a real number and the time to think about it. No pressure to sign on the spot.

The warranty you can get here, and why not everyone can offer it

Sunshine is a GAF Master Elite contractor. That is worth something specific to you rather than being a badge on a website: the GAF Golden Pledge can only be offered by GAF Master Elite Roofing Contractors, and once we register it, GAF sends its own inspector to your home to check the installation meets their specification before it stands.

That is a manufacturer checking our work at your house. Not our word for it — theirs. GAF Timberline and the Designer Series shingles carry a Lifetime Limited Warranty; IKO provides a Limited Lifetime Warranty on its shingle products.

Our installation crews are our own, factory trained and certified by the manufacturers whose products they install. We have been doing this in Northern Virginia since 1993, and we also do cedar shake and slate when a house calls for it.