Overnight roof leak stabilised in Chapel Hill

The scope

A single call to the emergency line just before midnight during the February ice storm. Water was running down the wall of a bedroom in a 1990s house in Chapel Hill, from the corner of a skylight that had been installed by someone else four years earlier.

Chapel Hill is emergency coverage only for us, and the caller was told that on the phone before a crew was dispatched. What that means in practice is that we come out for the emergency and we do not book the scheduled follow-up work there, and it is better to hear that at midnight than the following week.

The challenge

Water entering a finished ceiling is on our escalation list, which means the call goes to a person rather than into a queue. The immediate risk is not the roof, it is the ceiling: a drywall lid holding several gallons of water will come down in one piece, usually onto whatever is under it.

The temperature was below freezing, the roof was iced, and the skylight sat on the high side of a 6/12 pitch. Nobody was walking that surface at one in the morning, and the honest emergency answer was not to try.

What we did

Two things at midnight, in this order.

Inside first: we relieved the ceiling. A small hole punched at the low point of the bulge drains a bulging ceiling into a bucket in a controlled way, and it saves the ceiling more often than it ruins it. The owner's furniture came out of the room and plastic went down.

Outside second, from a ladder at the eave rather than on the ice: a self-adhering membrane patch over the head of the skylight and a weighted tarp across the plane above it, anchored at the ridge without a single fastener through good shingles. That is a stabilisation, not a repair, and it was described that way on the invoice.

We came back once the ice cleared to do the actual flashing repair: the original installation had relied on sealant over a surface-mounted apron rather than step flashing woven into the courses, which is a detail that always fails, and always at the head.

The outcome

The ceiling was patched by the owner's decorator rather than replaced. The roof repair itself took half a day.

The after-hours call-out fee applied, because the dispatch happened outside dispatch hours, and it was stated on the phone before the crew left the yard rather than added at the end. The owner has since had the rest of the roof inspected by a Chapel Hill contractor, which is what we recommended.

Finished 22 February 2026.