The winter roof checklist for a cottage

Closing weekend has a running order. Water gets shut off and the lines blown out, the dock comes up, the boat goes on the trailer, the fridge gets emptied and propped open. Somewhere in there somebody looks up at the roof for about four seconds, decides it looks fine, and locks the door until May.

That four seconds is the cheapest hour of maintenance you will ever skip. A cottage roof is the one part of the property that has to work unsupervised for six months in the hardest conditions of the year. Nobody is going to notice a drip in January. The bill in April is not for the flashing, it is for the insulation, the drywall, the framing and the mould remediation that grew out of it.

Here is the walk we would do, in the order we would do it, on any cottage in Muskoka, the Kawarthas, Grey Bruce or the back side of Simcoe County before the road gets bad.

Do it in late September, not on the last trip out

Two reasons for the timing.

The first is that a September inspection still leaves you a repair window. Local contractors are busy in the fall, but they are working. Find a lifted flashing on Thanksgiving Monday and you have a fair chance of getting someone up there before freeze-up. Find it on the last weekend of October and you are into the season where every roofer worth calling is booked out and half the work becomes weather dependent.

The second is that most of the leaves have not come down yet, but enough have to tell you where they collect. You want to see the pattern of what lands on your roof, then come back and clear it properly on the last trip.

Start from the ground with binoculars

You do not need to be on the roof for most of this, and on a steep wet cottage roof in October you should not be. A decent pair of binoculars from four or five spots around the building will show you more than a nervous scramble on a ladder.

Walk the full perimeter and look for:

• Lifted, curled or missing shingles, particularly on the south and west elevations, which age fastest
• Dark patches or streaking that were not there last year, which usually means granule loss on asphalt
• Anything sitting proud of the roof plane: a flashing edge lifting, a ridge cap corner peeled up, a vent cover rotated
• Sag in the roof line itself, sighted along the ridge and the eave
• Trees touching or nearly touching the roof. Branch tips that reach the roof in a calm September will flog it all winter and hold moisture against it year round

Take photos on your phone. Next September you will have something to compare to, and if you ever do need to make an insurance claim, a dated set of before photos is worth real money.

Clear the valleys, then clear them again

On a treed lot this is the single highest value thing on the list, and almost nobody does it thoroughly.

Needles and leaves pack into valleys and behind any roof-mounted obstruction. That debris holds water against the roof surface indefinitely, which is what rots a valley out early on asphalt and what causes the tea-staining and premature finish wear you occasionally see on metal. Worse, in November it freezes into a dam, and then meltwater runs sideways under the shingle courses instead of down the valley.

Clear it with a roof rake or a leaf blower from a ladder if you can reach safely, or hire it out with the eavestrough cleaning. Do it after the leaves have actually dropped. A valley cleared in early October and refilled by Halloween has not been cleared.

Pine and hemlock lots in Muskoka and the Kawarthas drop needles continuously rather than in one go, so those roofs want a look every year without exception. This is the main ongoing maintenance item on a cottage roof, metal or asphalt, and it is why we tell clients on treed lots to budget an annual clearing rather than assuming a new roof means nothing to do.

The eavestrough is a winter problem

A trough full of wet leaves freezes into a solid block. That block adds weight the hangers were not sized for, it blocks the one drainage path meltwater has, and it gives ice a place to start building back up under the eave.

Clear the troughs and flush the downspouts. Check that the downspouts still discharge away from the foundation and are not simply dumping beside a wall that will heave. If your troughs are hung with old spikes rather than hidden hangers, push on them: a trough you can move by hand is one that will come off the fascia under ice load.

On a cottage with a steep roof and no snow retention, there is a legitimate argument for taking the troughs down for the winter entirely, or leaving certain runs off. Sliding snow will take a trough with it, and a trough is cheaper to remove than to replace. We go through this in more detail in our article on eavestroughs and gutters on a metal roof.

Check the penetrations, because that is where it leaks

Roof fields rarely leak. Penetrations leak. The short list, in the order they cause trouble:

Chimney flashing. Look at the joint where the flashing meets the masonry. If the caulking is cracked, shrunken or lifting, that is a winter leak waiting to happen. On an older cottage, check the mortar in the chimney itself too, freeze-thaw on a saturated chimney does real damage over one season.

Plumbing vent boots. The rubber collar around the stack is the shortest-lived component on most roofs, commonly cracking around the fifteen year mark, well before the shingles are finished. It is a cheap part and a quick fix, and it is responsible for a surprising share of stains on cottage ceilings.

Skylights. Check the seal and the condition of the frame, and be honest about any staining on the interior casing. A skylight that weeps a little in October will ice up and weep considerably more in February.

Roof vents. Confirm the covers are intact and nothing has nested inside them over the summer.

Look up from inside before you lock the door

Take a flashlight into the attic, or into the loft, and look at the underside of the roof boards. You are looking for dark staining, white mineral trails around nails, any dampness, or actual frost.

Then check the soffits from inside: if insulation has been pushed out over the top plate and is blocking the intake vents, your roof cavity has no airflow. That is the condition that produces condensation, damp sheathing and ice damming, and it is extremely common on cottages where somebody added insulation at some point without installing baffles.

A blocked soffit is fixable in an afternoon and matters more over one winter than almost anything else on this list. If you find drips that appear on cold mornings and stop by noon, you are probably not looking at a leak at all, and our piece on metal roof condensation and ventilation explains what is actually happening.

If it is already a metal roof

The list gets shorter, which is most of the point of having one.

On an exposed-fastener or screw-down roof, walk the elevations with binoculars and look for backed-out screws and any washer that has gone hard and grey. Those washers are the wear item, and on a seasonal property nobody is there to notice the first one that fails. Budget on re-screwing the roof once in its life.

On a standing seam roof, there are no field fasteners to check. Look at the seam retention if you have it, confirm the clamps are still where they were placed, clear the valleys, and check the sealant at any low-slope transitions and at the chimney. That is genuinely the whole list.

Either way, do not go up on a metal roof in wet October conditions. It is slick in a way asphalt is not, and there is nothing on that list worth the fall.

Snow retention is a September decision

If sliding snow is going to land on a deck, an entry, a set of stairs down to the water, a hot tub or a parked vehicle, the time to deal with it is before the snow, not after the first slab comes off.

On a standing seam roof, seam-mounted retention clamps on without penetrating the panel, so it can be added later to an existing roof and placed exactly where the risk is. On other roof types, retention has to be fastened through the covering, which is a job for a roofer and not for a homeowner with a ladder. Either way, map it to where people and property actually are, not across the whole roof. The full reasoning is in our article on snow guards and ice dams.

What can wait until spring, and what cannot

Things that can wait: cosmetic granule loss, a slightly faded elevation, a trough that needs re-pitching, oil-canning you have noticed on a metal roof, most paint and finish concerns.

Things that cannot wait: active water in the attic, daylight visible through the roof boards, a lifted or open flashing, a cracked vent boot, a valley you can see is blocked, and any sag in the roof structure. If you find one of those on closing weekend, make the call before you drive home. A tarp and a temporary repair in October costs a fraction of what the same problem costs in April.

One more honest note. If the roof is near the end of its life, a cottage is the property where you want to replace it early rather than squeeze out the last two winters. A suburban house in Barrie or Collingwood gets a leak noticed the same day. A cottage on Georgian Bay or Stoney Lake does not, and that difference is what turns a roofing job into a renovation.

If you want a straight assessment of what your cottage roof has left, or you are planning a re-roof for next season, the time to start the conversation is now, because cottage country scheduling fills first. Call 705-816-5282 or get in touch. You can also read what we specify for standing seam in Muskoka and why cottages are the clearest case for it.