Roof Decking Replacement and Rot Repair in San Antonio

Pull back a shingle and you'll find felt or synthetic underlayment. Under that is the decking, sometimes called sheathing: plywood, OSB or wood planks nailed across the rafters. Everything above depends on it. Let it stay wet long enough and it rots, swells or comes apart in layers, and then it won't hold a nail. Roof decking replacement is cutting those sections out after tear-off and putting in new sheets of the same thickness before the roof goes back on.

Here's what a lot of homeowners only learn once the crew's already up there. Nobody can tell you from the driveway how much decking you'll need.

We can spot the obvious stuff from the attic and the surface. A sagging line between rafters. A spot that feels soft underfoot. Dark stains or white mold on the underside of the plywood, or daylight near a vent pipe or down in a valley. The real number, though, comes after the shingles are off and we can walk every sheet. Bad ones get marked, cut back to rafter centers and replaced.

Older San Antonio houses are their own case. Homes built before the 1970s on the South Side, in Monte Vista and in Southtown often have 1x6 or 1x8 planks with gaps between the boards. Owens Corning and GAF both want a solid deck under their shingles, with board gaps kept to about a quarter inch. Wider gaps or split boards mean we overlay the planks with new sheets or re-deck that slope. Yes, it costs more up front. It's still the right call, because a shingle nailed into a gap tends to leave in the next big wind.

Rot starts as a leak nobody fixed. Then it spreads. Around here we find it in the same four places over and over: valleys where two slopes pour water together, step flashing along walls and chimneys, pipe boots that cracked years back, and the low eave where the gutters kept overflowing. Stains in your attic near any of those? Then you're likely looking at a roof leak repair and a decking repair together, and we'll handle both in one trip with one crew. Slapping a new shingle over rotted wood just sets up a second claim.

Storms feed it, too. The April 2016 hailstorm dropped 4.5-inch stones on Helotes, and the record hail of May 2021 cracked plenty of roofs that got patched when they should've been replaced. Give a bruised shingle five years of slow seepage and a sound sheet of plywood turns into something you can push a screwdriver through.

On storm claims that go through our insurance claims process, our in-house former adjusters photograph and measure every sheet we replace. Decking is one of the items most often missing from a first adjuster estimate, and with good documentation it's also one of the easiest to supplement.

And it doesn't end at the deck. Soft fascia, rotted rafter tails and crumbling sub-fascia usually sit right beside the bad sheets. We replace those on the same job, so the new flashing and drip edge have something solid to fasten into.

1. Free evaluation. We go over the roof and through the attic, note every soft spot and stain, and put decking on the written estimate as a per-sheet price, so tear-off day doesn't surprise you.
2. Tear-off and inspection. Shingles and old felt come off. Our crew lead walks each sheet, marks the soft, delaminated or rotted ones and photographs them before they're cut out.
3. Cut, replace, nail to pattern. Bad sections get cut back to rafter centers and replaced with plywood or OSB of matching thickness, nailed on the shingle maker's schedule.
4. Dry-in before the crew leaves. Synthetic underlayment, ice-and-water shield in the valleys and new drip edge go down the same day the deck's opened.
5. Shingles and final walk. Owens Corning or GAF shingles go on, and we walk the finished roof with you, plus the adjuster if there's a claim.

A lot of the time, decking is what decides between a roof repair and a full roof replacement. Two bad sheets beside a failed pipe boot on one slope? We fix that slope. A roof past 20 years old with soft decking on three sides is another story. New shingles over that would just be spending money on top of the real problem. We'll tell you which one you've got.

Texas-RRR is veteran owned, registered and insured, and Charlie Carreon, who owns it, has 30 years of roofing experience. Estimates are free. We mean that literally.