Emergency Roof Repair — Central Florida

If water is coming in right now

Call. That is the first move — before climbing anything, before buying a tarp, and before waiting for the weather to improve.

Call 689-600-3099.

While you wait, the useful things are all indoors and all low-risk. Move what you can out from under it. Put a container down and empty it before it overflows. If the ceiling is bulging and holding water, a small hole at the lowest point will drain it in a controlled way instead of letting a section come down at once. Photograph everything as you go, before you move it and after.

What is not useful is going onto a wet roof. More people are hurt in the hour after a leak starts than by the leak itself. Whatever is up there will still be up there when the weather allows.

The mistake almost everybody makes

The most common instinct is to wait for the rain to stop before doing anything or calling anyone. It feels sensible. It is the wrong call, and it is the single most expensive habit we see.

The water is arriving now. Everything it passes through on the way down — insulation, drywall, framing, ceiling cavities — is absorbing it now. By the time the weather clears, the roof leak has become a moisture problem in the structure, and those are two different jobs with two different costs.

Calling during the rain does not mean anyone walks a roof during the rain. It means the clock starts, the details get taken, and the response is organised rather than improvised after the fact.

What actually happens when you call

Plainly, and without dressing it up: we answer, we take the details, and we get in the truck.

We will not put a number of minutes on that, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. A published response time is a promise made before knowing where you are, what the weather is doing, or what else is already in progress. During a storm event every roofer in Central Florida is fielding calls at once, and the honest thing to say is that we come as soon as we can get to you — not a figure invented for a website.

What we do commit to is that the call is answered by someone who can act on it, and that you are told what to expect rather than left waiting on a promise nobody can keep.

Why most tarps fail

A tarp is not a cover thrown over a hole. Wind is what put the water in, and wind is what takes an unsecured tarp off — usually within hours, often making the opening larger on the way.

A tarp holds because of how it is fastened, not because of what it is made of. Ours are secured with wood battens and screws, and sandbags where the situation calls for them — frequently a combination of both, depending on the roof and the weather still to come.

The battens are the part DIY tarping usually misses. Wrapping the edge of a tarp around a length of timber and screwing that timber down spreads the load along its whole length. Without it, every gust concentrates on the individual fixings and works them loose one at a time.

A tarp installed properly buys you days or weeks of dry structure while a permanent repair is scoped and scheduled. One installed badly buys you an afternoon and a bigger hole.

The tarp is free and it is yours

We provide a 30-foot by 50-foot blue tarp at no charge, and you keep it. It is not a rental, it is not added quietly to a later invoice, and it does not come back with us.

One honest limit: this runs on a promotional supply of 100 tarps. That is a real number rather than a countdown device — when the supply is used, the offer stops and we will say so plainly.

What gets documented — and the limit on what that means

Everything gets documented and photographed. Condition on arrival, the point of entry once it is found, what the water reached inside, and what was done to stop it. Timestamped, before anything is moved or covered.

That record is useful to you regardless of what happens next, and it is worth having whether or not a claim is ever made.

Here is the limit, stated plainly. Timothy Parks Roofing & Construction, Inc. is a roofing contractor, not a public adjuster. We inspect roof conditions, provide documentation, and prepare repair or replacement scopes. We do not file, negotiate, adjust or settle insurance claims. Coverage, deductible, payment and premium-credit decisions are made by your insurance carrier under your policy. Homeowners are responsible for the deductibles required by their policy — TPROCO does not pay, waive, rebate or compensate insurance deductibles. Filing false, incomplete or misleading insurance claim information can constitute insurance fraud under Florida Statutes §817.234.

If a contractor arrives during a storm and starts telling you what your insurer will pay, that is the moment to be careful.

The part nearly everyone forgets

Two things get missed more than anything else when a roof lets water in: tarping and water remediation.

The tarping gets missed because the rain stops and the urgency evaporates. The remediation gets missed because the roof is what visibly failed, so the roof is what gets attention — and the water that already went through the ceiling is treated as somebody else's problem, or as no problem at all.

It is a problem. Wet insulation does not dry usefully on its own in Florida humidity. Wet drywall stays wet behind paint. Wet framing in an enclosed cavity is the beginning of a considerably larger conversation, and none of it announces itself for weeks.

Stopping the leak and drying the structure are two separate jobs. A roofer who only does the first one has finished half the work and, more often than not, has not told you there was a second half.

Reading the stain: how urgent is this really

A quick assessment you can make yourself while you wait.

A dark, damp-looking patch usually means the water arrived recently. Unwelcome, but fresh.

A brown stain is worse. Brown typically indicates rot — the water has been present long enough to start breaking material down. If the stain is brown, this is not the first time water has come through, whatever tonight's weather did.

That distinction changes the conversation from an emergency repair to a conversation about how long it has been happening and what it has already reached. Neither is a disaster, but they are different problems and it is better to know which one you have.

One more thing worth knowing: the leak is almost never directly above the stain. Water enters at one point, travels along the deck or a rafter, and drops where the framing lets it. How far it travelled cannot be worked out from underneath.

After a named storm

Lake County has taken Hurricane Milton in October 2024 and Hurricane Ian in September 2022. Both crossed this area, and both are on the record.

A roof that came through either may be carrying wind damage that is not visible from the ground. Wind often does not strip shingles off; it lifts them, breaks the seal strip, and lays them back down. From the driveway, nothing looks wrong. The next sustained rain finds the gap — which is why a roof that seemed fine after the storm starts leaking months later during an ordinary afternoon downpour.

After a qualifying storm we offer a $75 post-storm inspection. If your roof went through Milton or Ian and has not been looked at since, that is a reasonable thing to have done whether or not you have seen a problem yet.

When the emergency exposes something structural

Sometimes the water has been getting in longer than anyone realised, and opening the area finds decking that has gone soft — occasionally framing that has.

This is where the licences matter in a practical way. A roofing-only contractor cannot legally perform structural repair. When they find it, work stops and you are looking for a second contractor with your roof open and the weather still coming.

Timothy Parks Roofing & Construction holds CBC059592, a Florida Certified Building Contractor licence, alongside CCC1327217 Certified Roofing Contractor and HI4878 Licensed Home Inspector. Building, remodelling and structural repair are all within scope. The company that opens it can close it.

In an emergency that is a scheduling advantage more than a technical one, and scheduling is most of what goes wrong after a storm.

Who knocks on your door after a storm

After a named storm, people you have never met start arriving in your neighbourhood offering to fix your roof. Some are legitimate contractors working extra hours. Some are not, and the ones who are not are very good at the first ten minutes of the conversation.

You do not have to be able to tell them apart by instinct. Florida keeps a public register, and it takes about a minute to use.

Ask for the licence number. Not the company name, not a business card, not a magnetic door sign — the licence number. Then look it up on the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation website and confirm three things: that it exists, that it is current, and that the name on it matches the person standing in front of you.

A legitimate contractor will hand you that number without hesitation, because it is the thing that proves they are what they say they are. Hesitation at that question is the whole answer.

Ours are CBC059592, CCC1327217 and HI4878, displayed on every page of this site as Florida requires.

As for us: Timothy Parks Roofing & Construction is a BBB Accredited Business with an A+ rating. Accreditation is not automatic — it is applied for, reviewed, and withdrawn if a company stops meeting the standard. Forty-six years in Central Florida and an A+ on file is a different proposition from a magnetic sign that appeared in your street the week after a hurricane.

Two other things worth knowing while your roof is open. A deposit written directly to a supply house rather than to a contractor is materially safer, because the money buys materials that arrive at your property instead of disappearing with a truck. And any agreement worth signing survives being read tomorrow — urgency about a signature is about the signature, not about your roof.

What to have ready when we arrive

None of this is essential and none of it should be gathered at any risk. It simply makes the visit faster and the record better.

• Photographs from before, if you happen to have any — a listing photo, a family picture with the house in the background, anything showing the roof previously
• Roughly when it started. Tonight, or has it happened before in heavy rain? That single answer changes the diagnosis substantially
• The age of the roof, if you know it, or when you bought the house
• Attic access, if there is one and it is safe to reach
• Where the water appeared — and whether it moved, because water that migrates across a ceiling has travelled further than water that drips in one place

If you have none of it, that is genuinely fine. The roof will tell us most of it. But a homeowner who can say this is the third time and it always happens on the north side in a hard rain has narrowed the search considerably before anyone gets a ladder off the truck.

What happens next

An emergency response stops the water and protects the structure. It is not the repair, and we will not pretend otherwise while standing in your hallway.

Once things are dry and the weather allows, the roof gets properly assessed and you get a scope for the actual work — see roof repair for what that involves, or roof inspection if you would rather start with a written assessment before deciding anything.

We work from Clermont and serve Lake, Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Polk, Volusia and Hernando counties. All three licences are current Florida DBPR licences.

Common questions