You can see
one part of it.
Roof repair, replacement and storm work across Little Rock and Pulaski County. We tell you what is actually failing up there — and what is not — before anybody quotes anything.
Fig. 1 — Ridge cap and vent, Hillcrest. Hail counts are Pulaski County records from the NOAA Storm Events Database, 2015–2024. More than half of them landed in March and April.
The deck
The plywood or board sheathing everything else is nailed to. The only structural layer on this list.
What goes wrongNails will not hold in soft, delaminated decking. Shingle over a rotted deck and the roof is fastened to nothing.
Ice-and-water barrier
A self-adhering membrane at the eaves and in the valleys. It seals around every nail driven through it.
What goes wrongLeft out of the valleys, water backing up under the shingles has an open path to the deck. NRCA puts it at least 24 inches inside the exterior wall line.
Underlayment
The full-deck layer over everything the ice barrier does not cover — felt or a synthetic sheet.
What goes wrongThis is the roof’s second chance. When a shingle lifts in a storm, underlayment is the only thing between wind-driven rain and your ceiling.
Drip edge
Metal at the eaves and rakes carrying runoff past the fascia and into the gutter instead of behind it.
What goes wrongReversed at the eave, water on the underlayment runs behind the metal. The rot shows up in the fascia years later and nobody connects it to the roof.
Starter strip
A purpose-made sealed course at the eaves and up the rakes, under the first row of shingles.
What goes wrongEvery major manufacturer requires starter at the rakes — not just the eaves — for the upgraded wind warranty. Cut-up field shingles will not seal and will not qualify.
Field shingles
The part you see from the street, fastened inside the manufacturer’s nail zone — a band under two inches tall.
What goes wrongNails above the zone catch one laminate layer instead of two. Overdriven nails cut the mat. Both look identical from the ground and both fail early in wind.
Hip and ridge cap
Purpose-made cap shingles bent over the hips and ridge — not field shingles cut into thirds.
What goes wrongSubstituting cut field shingles cuts warranty terms on some systems by more than half. It is a common way to shave a bid and it is invisible until you file a claim.
Ridge vent and intake
Continuous exhaust at the ridge, matched by intake at the soffits so the attic actually moves air.
What goes wrongIntake must equal or exceed exhaust. Mix a ridge vent with box vents or a power fan and the upper vent becomes an intake — it pulls weather in. Inadequate ventilation alone can drop a lifetime warranty to ten years.
Start with what you can actually see.
You do not need to know what is wrong to call. But if you want to know what you are looking at first, pick the thing you have noticed.
The shingle surface is shedding its granules.
Those granules are the shingle's sunscreen. Once enough of them wash off, UV reaches the asphalt underneath and the mat starts to harden and curl. A little shedding is normal on a new roof. Steady shedding on an older one means the field is at the end of its service life, not that a repair will fix it.
Roof replacement →Water is getting in at a detail, not through the field.
Ceiling stains almost never come from a hole in the middle of the roof. They come from flashing — where the roof meets a wall, a chimney, or a pipe. The classic one in a two-storey house is a missing kick-out flashing at a roof-to-wall junction, which pours water into the wall cavity on every storm with nothing showing outside.
Roof repair →The seal strip let go, or the nails were placed wrong.
Shingles bond to each other with a heat-activated seal strip. Wind gets under an unsealed edge and peels from there. When a whole run lifts along a rake, that usually points at missing starter strip up the gable rather than at the wind itself.
Storm damage repair →Hail hit hard enough to bruise the roof too.
Metal is the tell. If the gutter aprons, vent caps and downspouts are dimpled, the shingles took the same strikes — a hail bruise crushes the mat under the granules and often will not be visible from the ground for months. This is the condition worth documenting before anything else.
Storm damage repair →The deck under the shingles has gone soft.
A visible sag is a structural symptom, not a surface one. It usually means sheathing has taken on water long enough to delaminate, sometimes with framing involved. Shingles laid over it will not hold their nails, so this gets opened up and looked at before anything is quoted.
Roof replacement →The attic is not moving air the way it should.
Exhaust at the ridge only works if there is matching intake at the soffits. When intake is blocked by insulation, or when a ridge vent is mixed with box vents or a power fan, airflow short-circuits and one of them starts pulling weather in. Inadequate ventilation on its own can cut a lifetime shingle warranty down to ten years.
Roof repair →Three jobs. We will tell you which one you need.
- 04.1 Roof repair
Flashing, valleys, pipe boots, lifted shingles and ventilation. Most roofing repair work in Little Rock is a detail failing, not a field failing — and a detail is worth fixing properly.
- 04.2 Roof replacement
Full tear-off to the deck, soft sheathing replaced, then the whole assembly back on in the right order. You get told what is going on the roof before it goes on.
- 04.3 Storm and hail damage
Documented properly, and we meet your adjuster on the roof so the write-up matches the damage. Pulaski County logged 97 hail events in ten years — this is the work that defines roofing here.
Little Rock is hard on roofs in two specific ways.
Two storm seasons, not one
Pulaski County logged 97 hail events between 2015 and 2024 — 69 of them at an inch or bigger, the largest a 2.75-inch stone. Hail peaks in March and April. Damaging straight-line wind peaks separately, in May through July, and the county recorded 172 thunderstorm wind events over the same decade with a measured gust of 95 mph. A roof here is worked by two different storm modes on two different calendars. What hail does is rarely dramatic: the strike bruises the mat under the granules, the granules wash off over following seasons, and the shingle ages years early with nothing to see from the street.
Housing stock with complicated roofs
Hillcrest, the Heights and the Quapaw Quarter are largely built out from between 1890 and 1940 — Craftsman and bungalow houses with steep pitches, dormers and cut-up valleys. Those roofs almost never fail in the open field. They fail where two planes meet, where a dormer cheek hits the slope, and where a chimney passes through. West of University, Chenal Valley and the newer Maumelle subdivisions are simpler roofs with a different problem: builder-grade ventilation that was marginal the day it was signed off.
| Location | Typical era | What tends to fail | Usual job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hillcrest · the Heights | 1890–1940 | Valleys, dormer flashing, chimney step flashing | Roof repair |
| Quapaw Quarter | Pre-1930 | Complex rooflines, aged flashing details | Roof repair |
| Chenal Valley · West Little Rock | 1980s onward | Attic ventilation balance, ridge detail | Repair or replacement |
| Maumelle · Sherwood · Bryant | 1980s–2000s | Hail bruising across the open field | Storm damage · replacement |
Questions we get asked before anything else.
It comes down to whether the problem is a detail or the field. Water coming in at a wall, a chimney or a pipe is a flashing problem and repairs cleanly. Granules washing out of the whole roof, shingles curling across every slope, or a deck that has gone soft means the field is finished and a replacement is the honest answer. We will tell you which one you have before you commit to anything.
Probably, and sooner rather than later. Hail bruising crushes the mat under the granules and often shows nothing from the ground for months. The quickest tell you can check yourself is soft metal — if the gutter aprons, vent caps and downspouts are dimpled, the shingles took the same strikes. There is also a clock on it: the Arkansas Insurance Department treats a 365-day reporting window as reasonable, with a good-cause exception, and considers a claim reported more than 24 months after the loss reasonably denied.
It can, and this changed recently. Arkansas Insurance Department Bulletin 17-2023 allows insurers to apply a mandatory roof schedule endorsement once a roof reaches seven years old, which settles a wind or hail claim at actual cash value — the depreciated amount — rather than replacement cost. It also allows a separate mandatory wind and hail deductible distinct from your all-perils one. Worth reading your declarations page before a storm rather than after.
We document the damage and we meet the adjuster on the roof so that what gets written up matches what is actually up there. What we do not do is negotiate the claim — nobody can. Arkansas does not license public adjusters at all, so no contractor in this state may negotiate or settle a claim on your behalf. Anyone telling you they will handle the insurance company for you is describing something Arkansas does not permit. We also do not absorb or discount your deductible.
Not for a residential roof. Little Rock exempted residential roofs from the work-permit requirement in Ordinance 22,204, effective January 2023, and the exemption was carried forward again for 2026. That exempts the job from city permitting and inspection — it does not exempt it from the Arkansas Fire Prevention Code, which still applies in full. It just means no inspector is checking. That is worth knowing when you pick who goes up there.
Most single-family roofs here are a one to two day job once the crew is on site, weather permitting. Older Hillcrest and Heights houses with steep pitches, multiple dormers and cut-up valleys take longer than a newer Chenal Valley or Maumelle roof of the same square footage, because the detail work is where the time goes.
Yes, and they are most of what we look at. Little Rock has a lot of housing stock from between 1890 and 1940 in Hillcrest, the Heights and the Quapaw Quarter — steep slopes, dormers, complicated valleys. Those roofs fail at the details long before they fail in the field, which is exactly the kind of work a repair fixes properly.
Yes. A roof with eight good years left in it does not need replacing because somebody knocked on the door after a storm. If that is what we find, that is what we will tell you, and we will put it in writing so you have it when the next crew turns up.
Tell us what the roof is doing.
A description is enough to start. If it is a leak, say roughly where it shows up inside — that narrows it down faster than a photo does.