Field Notes

The single most common thing we hear on a Bartlesville driveway is "it looks fine from down here." It usually does. Hail rarely punches holes in an asphalt shingle. What it does is fracture the fibreglass mat underneath the surface and knock the protective granules loose, and neither of those is visible from the ground or from a ladder at the eave.

What we look for, in order. First the soft metals — the vents, the gutters, the downspouts, the flashing, and the fins on the air-conditioning condenser. Aluminium dents where a shingle only bruises, so soft metals tell us both that hail fell and roughly how big it was. If the condenser fins are dimpled and the gutter has a dozen dents in it, we already know what we are going to find on the roof.

Then the field of the roof. We mark a ten-by-ten test square on each slope, walk it, and chalk every strike inside it. A bruise feels like a soft spot under your thumb — the mat has fractured but the surface has not opened. Count the bruises in the square and you have a damage density an adjuster can work with, and a photograph that dates the loss.

Then the sealant strips. Hail and wind together break the factory seal between shingle courses. The shingle sits there looking perfect and lifts in the next forty-mile gust. This is the damage homeowners almost never find and the damage that causes the leak two winters later.

What you can check yourself, safely, from the ground. Look in the gutters and at the bottom of the downspouts for a build-up of granules that looks like coarse black sand. Look at the downspouts and gutter faces for dents. Look at the air-conditioning unit. Look at any painted metal — a mailbox, a grill lid, a garage door. If those show impact, your roof took the same storm.

What not to do. Do not get on the roof. A roof that has just been hailed is covered in loose granules, which is roughly like walking on ball bearings. And do not let anyone who knocked on your door get on it either until you have their Oklahoma CIB registration number and you have looked it up.

Our inspection is free and the photographs are yours whether you hire us or not. If your roof is fine, you get a dated photo set proving it was fine — which is worth having on file the next time somebody tells you it is not.

Most Oklahoma homeowner policies are replacement-cost policies, and the way they pay catches people out every single hail season. They do not write you one cheque. They write you two, and the second one has conditions attached.

The first cheque is actual cash value. That is what it would cost to replace your roof today, minus depreciation for the age and condition of the old roof, minus your deductible. On a fifteen-year-old roof the depreciation can be a very large number. Homeowners often open that envelope, see a figure well short of any quote they have been given, and conclude the claim was not worth filing.

The second cheque is the depreciation the carrier withheld. You get it once the work is actually done and invoiced. That is the recoverable depreciation, and on an older roof it is frequently the larger of the two amounts.

Here is the part with the deadline. Replacement-cost policies generally require the work to be completed within six months of the date of loss before that withheld amount is released. Not started. Not contracted. Completed and invoiced. For the May 8, 2026 storm that puts the deadline somewhere around November 8, 2026 — and the exact wording is in your policy, so read it or ring your agent and ask them to read it to you.

Sit on a settlement past that date and you can lose the recoverable depreciation entirely. You keep the first cheque and you pay the rest of the roof yourself. We have watched Bartlesville homeowners do it, usually because they were waiting to "decide in the spring."

Two things worth knowing alongside it. Your deductible is yours — it is illegal in Oklahoma for a contractor to pay, rebate, absorb or waive any part of it, and anyone offering is proposing insurance fraud with your name on it. And if the carrier's scope leaves out code-required items like ice and water shield, drip edge, or ventilation, that is a supplement, not a bill for you to swallow. We document those and submit them.

None of this is legal or insurance advice — your policy is between you and your carrier, and the specifics vary. But if your roof was damaged on May 8 and you have not yet had it looked at, the calendar is the reason to do it this month rather than next.

The question we get asked most about gutters is whether the six-inch is worth the money. The honest answer is that it depends on something most people never measure: how much roof drains into that particular run, and how fast that roof sheds water.

Roof area is the first variable. A gutter is sized to the square footage of roof feeding it, not the footprint of the house. A long ranch with one continuous eave and a hip roof behind it can send far more water into a single run than a larger two-storey where the same roof area is split across four separate runs.

Pitch is the second, and it is the one that gets missed. A steep roof does not just collect water, it accelerates it. Water arriving fast at the eave overshoots a shallow gutter entirely in heavy rain, which is why some houses have gutters that stay bone dry inside during a downpour while water sheets off the front of them.

Downspouts are the third, and they are usually the real problem. A six-inch gutter carries roughly forty per cent more water than a five-inch one, but if you feed it into the same two-by-three downspouts you have simply moved the bottleneck. Most of the overflowing corners we are called out to look at in Bartlesville are not clogged gutters at all — they are a correctly sized gutter draining through undersized or too-few outlets. Three-by-four downspouts, and more of them, fix more overflow complaints than a gutter upsize ever does.

Then there is where the water goes. A downspout that discharges against the foundation has not solved a drainage problem, it has concentrated one. Underground solid pipe run to daylight or a dry well is the difference between a gutter system and a decoration.

And check the fascia first. A gutter is only as sound as the board it hangs on. We look at the fascia before we quote, because hanging new seamless aluminium on rotted fascia is a job you will pay to do twice.

We roll seamless gutter to length on site, so the only seams on your house are at the corners and the outlets. When we quote, ask us which size the roof actually calls for and why — if a five-inch is right for your house we will tell you that and charge you for a five-inch.