Roof Repair in Clermont and Lake County

First: how bad is it? A test you can do from inside the house

If you are standing under a stain right now, this is the fastest useful thing anyone can tell you.

A brown stain is materially worse than a dark wet patch. A dark, damp-looking spot usually means water arrived recently. Brown typically means rot — the water has been sitting long enough to start breaking material down. That is not a stain any more, that is damage with a history.

Brown does not automatically mean a new roof. It does mean the clock has been running longer than you thought, and that whatever is above it has probably been wet more than once.

Second thing worth knowing: the leak is almost never directly above the stain. Water enters at one point, travels along the underside of the deck or down a rafter, and drops where gravity and framing decide. How far it travelled cannot be known from inside. That is not us being evasive — it is the reason a proper look matters before anyone quotes you.

It might not be the roof at all

We get called out to leaks that turn out to be condensation, air conditioning, and plumbing. All three are routinely mistaken for a roof leak, and all three can produce a ceiling stain that looks exactly like one.

An air handler in an attic sweating in a Florida summer will drip. A condensate line that has backed up will drip. A supply line in a wall or ceiling will drip. The stain looks the same from your sofa.

This matters to you in a practical way: if a roofer arrives, does not investigate, and sells you a roof repair for a plumbing problem, the stain comes back and the money is gone. Finding out what is actually happening is the first job, not an upsell before it.

The rule we actually use: pliable or brittle

Most people expect the answer to be about age. It is not. It is about the condition of the shingle.

A shingle that is still pliable is a repair candidate. It flexes. You can lift it, work under it, seal and re-seat it, and it will lie back down and keep doing its job.

A shingle that has gone brittle is not. It cracks when it is lifted. Working around brittle shingles breaks more than it fixes — you go up to repair one area and create three new failure points getting to it. That is not a repair, that is a slow way of paying for a roof twice.

This is why an old roof cannot simply be patched, and it is a far more honest answer than a number of years. Two roofs the same age, one shaded and one baking on an open ridge, will be in completely different condition. The shingle tells you; the calendar does not.

As a rough guide, any roof past about twelve years is a candidate for problems in this climate — not automatically failing, but worth looking at rather than assuming.

What the building code says a repair actually is

There is a legal boundary here, and it is worth knowing before anyone quotes you.

Under the Florida Building Code, Existing Building, section 611.1.1, a roof repair is the reconstruction or renewal of any part of an existing roof for maintenance — and it is limited to not more than 25 percent of the roof.

Beyond that threshold it is no longer a repair in the eyes of the code. Lake County draws the same distinctions in its own roofing guidelines, separating a roof replacement (remove the covering, repair damaged substrate, install new) from a roof recover (a new covering installed over the existing one) and a roof-over (a free-standing system not attached to the existing deck).

So when a contractor offers to "just patch" something that is clearly more than a quarter of your roof, they are either not pulling a permit or not describing the job accurately. Both should concern you.

Put the two rules together and you have a real decision framework: the code tells you how much you are allowed to repair; the shingle tells you whether the repair will hold.

After Milton and Ian: damage you cannot see from the ground

Lake County took Hurricane Milton in October 2024 and Hurricane Ian in September 2022. Both are on the record and both moved across this area.

A roof that has been through those storms may be carrying wind damage that is not visible from the ground. Wind does not always remove shingles — it lifts them, breaks the seal strip, and lays them back down. From your driveway the roof looks untouched. The next heavy rain finds the gap.

This is the most common reason a roof that "looks fine" leaks. If your roof has been through either storm and has not been looked at since, that is a reasonable thing to have checked regardless of whether you can see anything wrong.

What happens when the repair uncovers something structural

Sometimes lifting a section finds soft decking. Occasionally it finds a rafter or truss that has been wet long enough to matter.

Here is a distinction most homeowners never think about until it costs them: a roofing-only contractor cannot legally perform structural repair. Their licence does not cover it. When they find structural damage, work stops and you are looking for a second contractor, with your roof open.

Timothy Parks Roofing & Construction holds CBC059592, a Florida Certified Building Contractor licence, alongside the roofing licence. That means building, remodelling and structural repair are within our scope. If the deck under your leak turns out to be worse than expected, the same company that opened it can close it.

That is not a sales point so much as a scheduling and liability one. Two trades and two contracts on an open roof is where projects stall.

The pre-2002 rule that catches people out

Under the Florida Building Code, Existing Building, section 706.7.1, sheathing must be re-nailed on any detached single-family home built before 1 March 2002 when the roof is redone — equivalent to 8d nails at no more than 6 inches on centre.

You can check your own build year in seconds. If your house predates March 2002, re-nailing is not optional and not an upsell; it is code, and it will be inspected.

It also has a bearing on the repair-versus-replace conversation. If a roof is close to the line anyway, a job that triggers full re-nailing changes the arithmetic — and you should hear that before you decide, not after.

What Lake County inspects, and why we photograph everything

Lake County requires printed progress photographs on re-roof work — sheathing re-nailing, underlayment, and purlins or insulation — each shown with a ruler or measuring device in frame to verify fastener spacing and overlaps, including drip edge and valley flashing. Those photographs must be on site at final inspection and become part of the permanent inspection record.

A notarised scope-of-work and inspection affidavit must be there too, along with Florida Product Approval documentation for every product used on the job.

We mention this because it explains something homeowners often find odd: why a crew photographs so much. It is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the county's record of what is under your roof, and it is the reason a properly permitted job can be verified years later — including by a buyer or an insurer.

It also means a crew that is not photographing is telling you something.

The permit, and how long it really takes

Residential re-roof permits in Lake County are auto-issue. Once the application packet is submitted, the fees generate and the permit is issued. There is no waiting on a plan reviewer for a standard re-roof.

The exception is a property in a flood zone, which requires additional review before the permit can be issued.

A Notice of Commencement has to be recorded and certified before the permit is complete. Lake County's own re-roof checklist sets that requirement at a job value over $5,000. We prepare the document; the property owner signs and records it. Most homeowners have never heard of it until a job is held up because it was not filed.

Lake County Building Services is at 320 West Main Street, Tavares.

What a repair from us includes

Where a repair is the right answer, the work is done to the same standard as our replacements rather than to a lower one because it is smaller.

Where underlayment is disturbed or replaced, we use self-adhering peel-and-stick / SWR membrane — the same specification we install across an entire deck on a full replacement. Synthetic underlayment is not part of our build unless it is approved in writing.

Our workmanship warranty is 10 years and transferable — 5 years on low-slope. Transferable matters more than people expect: it survives the sale of the house, so it is worth something to a buyer rather than dying with your ownership.

If water is coming in right now

The first move is to pick up the phone and call — before climbing anything, before buying a tarp, and before waiting for the weather to improve.

The most common mistake we see is waiting for the rain to stop. That instinct is understandable and it is the wrong one: the water is arriving now, and everything it touches on the way through is absorbing it now.

Two things get missed more than anything else when a roof lets water in — tarping and water remediation. The leak gets found, the roof gets fixed, and nobody deals with what the water did to the insulation, the drywall and the framing on its way down. That damage keeps going after the roof stops leaking.

See our emergency roof repair page if this is happening right now.

The new $7,500 permit law — and why it does not cover your roof

Florida's House Bill 803 took effect on 1 July 2026, and homeowners have started asking about it. It creates a limited exemption from local building permits for certain work on single-family homes valued under $7,500.

If somebody has told you your roof repair no longer needs a permit because of it, read this before you agree to anything.

The exemption is written for non-structural, non-trade improvements — the analysis names cosmetic renovation, painting, cabinetry, flooring and drywall finishing. And it explicitly excludes electrical, plumbing, structural, mechanical and gas work, which still require a permit whatever they cost.

Roof work does not sit comfortably inside that exemption, and we do not treat it as though it does. Three reasons:

• Roofing is a licensed trade. The exemption is framed around non-trade work, and roofing has its own certification under Florida Statutes chapter 489.
• Re-roofing triggers structural work. Florida Building Code deck re-nailing is required on homes built before March 2002 — and structural work is an explicit exclusion.
• Lake County runs a full re-roof permit process with a notarised affidavit, product approval documentation and photographed progress inspections. That process exists.

Two other limits worth knowing. The exemption does not apply at all to property in a flood hazard area. And the law expressly prohibits splitting a job into smaller pieces to get under $7,500 — which is precisely what somebody avoiding a permit may propose to you.

One more thing, because the $7,500 figure is being attached to the wrong law. The Notice of Commencement is a separate statute doing a separate job, and its threshold is $5,000 under Fla. Stat. 713.135(1)(e) — above that direct contract amount a recorded NOC has to be on file with the issuing authority before the first inspection. HB 803 did not change it. On a re-roof it is usually the figure that applies to you, not the $7,500.

We pull permits. Unpermitted work becomes your problem, not the contractor's, at the point you sell the house.

When a repair stops making financial sense

At some point the arithmetic turns, and it is worth being able to do it yourself rather than taking anyone's word for it.

A full replacement is priced at $500 per square — a square being 100 square feet of roof. The SWR premium underlayment inside that price is supplied at cost, with no markup. Squares are waste-adjusted and rounded up: measured area, times the waste factor from the measurement report, divided by 100, rounded up to the next whole square.

A real example from our files: a roof measuring 4,517 square feet at an 11 percent waste factor becomes 5,014 square feet, which is 50.14 squares, which rounds up to 51.

So you can put a rough number on the replacement before anyone visits. Then set the repair quote against it, and against two other things: how much of the roof the repair actually covers — remembering the code caps a repair at 25 percent — and whether the shingles are still pliable enough for the repair to hold.

A repair that costs a meaningful fraction of a replacement, on brittle shingles, over more than a quarter of the roof, is not a repair. It is a deposit on doing the job twice.

Where a repair is clearly right, it is clearly right — and we will tell you that too. There is no version of this where selling you a roof you do not need works out well for us.

Send us the other quote

If you already have a repair quote in hand and cannot tell whether it is reasonable, send it to us and we will review it and write back. Free, no obligation, and you do not need to be considering us to use it.

You will get a written note on what the quote covers, what it does not, and which lines are likely to move once the work starts. On a repair the usual gaps are the underlayment specification where it is disturbed, whether decking is included if the crew finds soft wood, and whether the price assumes the shingles will co-operate.

We would rather you signed a good competitor's contract understanding it than signed ours because nobody else explained theirs.

Who is doing the work

Timothy Parks has been self-employed in construction for 46 years and holds three Florida licences: CBC059592 Certified Building Contractor, CCC1327217 Certified Roofing Contractor and HI4878 Licensed Home Inspector. All three are current Florida DBPR licences.

The inspector licence is the relevant one on a repair call. Diagnosing what is actually wrong is an inspection problem before it is a roofing problem, and the two are not the same skill.

We work from Clermont and serve Lake, Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Polk, Volusia and Hernando counties. Clermont is the base rather than a service-area entry on a map, which on repair work matters more than it does on a scheduled replacement — a repair is usually somebody who has just found water, and the difference between twenty minutes away and ninety is the difference between this afternoon and the end of the week.

Common questions