The Skywall roof replacement process — tear-off, decking inspection, underlayment, ventilation balance and a clean job site, backed by a 2 to 10 year workmanship warranty.
Skywall Construction · Roof Replacement in Round Rock TX · Free inspections, always
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A large share of the replacement work in Round Rock traces back to a single night. The National Weather Service log for 24 September 2023 runs from 2.75-inch stones up to a 4.0-inch measurement at 20:21, the reading tied to a $300 million damage figure. It was the costliest hail night on record for this region, and it arrived after dark.
Roofs that took it are reaching a replacement decision now, and the shape of that decision is specific enough to be worth setting out.
Impact at that size rarely breaks through anything. It fractures the mat beneath the granule surface, and the shingle goes on lying flat and shedding water with a break in its structure.
That is the condition an overlay handles worst. Laying a new course over shingles with fractured mat builds a new roof on a substrate that is already failing and permanently removes any ability to look at it. It also conceals the deck at the one moment it is accessible, which on a roof that has taken repeated impact is the thing most worth seeing. And it destroys the record: once the old covering is buried, what the storm actually did to it is no longer available to anybody.
Full tear-off is the answer here, and the storm history is the reason rather than a general preference.
Impact resistance is a measurable property. Shingles tested under UL 2218 are rated in classes, Class 4 being the highest, and that rating describes how a product behaves under a defined impact in a laboratory. It is not a promise about a particular storm. Nothing on the market is hailproof, and a four-inch stone is well outside what any residential covering is designed to shrug off.
What an impact-rated product changes is the margin. The products that earn the higher classes generally use a modified asphalt formulation that stays flexible rather than turning brittle, so an impact that would fracture a conventional mat is more likely to deform and recover. On a roof being replaced specifically because of hail, that trade-off deserves an actual conversation rather than a default selection.
The accessories deserve the same attention, and they are where an incomplete replacement shows itself. A storm that fractured shingle mat also dented vent caps, pipe collars, gutters, downspouts, and drip edge. Replacing the field and leaving struck soft metal in place produces a new roof with the old storm still sitting on it. The scope should list every accessory by name and say whether it is being replaced.
Hail does not strike every plane of a roof equally, and that raises a question worth asking out loud rather than letting slide: is this a replacement of the struck slopes, or of the entire roof.
Partial work is legitimate and it has real constraints. A new slope beside a weathered one does not match and will not begin to as it ages, since the weathered slope has already moved away from where it started. Tying new work into existing courses at a ridge or a hip means disturbing shingles that were not part of the problem. And the underlayment on the untouched slopes stays exactly as old as it was, which matters if the roof is well into its service life.
None of that makes partial replacement wrong. It makes it a decision that should be made plane by plane and written down that way, with the slopes being replaced identified individually, rather than left as an implication in a document that says “the roof.”
The build-out here ran hard from the 1990s into the 2000s, a subdivision at a time rather than a lot at a time, and two things follow from that for replacement work.
Streets roofed inside the same couple of years come due inside the same couple of years. Same installation window, same materials, same sun, same storms, so replacement in these neighborhoods tends to arrive in waves rather than at random.
Construction details repeat as well. The same crews used the same valley method, the same boots, the same approach to step flashing, and the same ventilation layout house after house. A correction identified on one roof is therefore very likely to apply next door, and a replacement is the single opportunity to correct a detail that was built into an entire street instead of reproducing it.
Which is a direct argument against writing a scope as replace like for like. On a street where a detail was consistently marginal, like for like delivers a new roof with the same marginal detail inside it. Anything worth changing should be named and described in the document rather than left to match what came off.
When a run of houses in one subdivision replaces in the same season, the logistics get crowded. Material drops, containers, and crew parking all compete for the same curb.
Worth settling in advance: where material is staged and for how long, where the container sits and how the driveway under it is protected, and how the street stays passable while work runs. None of that is complicated, and all of it creates friction when nobody agreed to it beforehand.
A replacement scope on a storm-driven job is doing two jobs. It describes the work, and it stands as the record of what was there before the tear-off removed the evidence.
Photographs at strip stage are worth requiring for that reason: the deck as found, any fracture visible in the removed material, and the condition of the accessories. If the replacement follows a claim, that is the account of the roof that existed before it came off. Hail is weather rather than anything a homeowner did, and how to handle it is your decision to make; what the paperwork should do is describe the roof accurately either way.
The scope should also state which flashings are new rather than reused. It is the easiest thing to leave vague and the most consequential thing to get wrong on a roof that is going to take hail again.
Every replacement starts with a free inspection and a written scope you can compare line by line. Call (512) 798-2222.
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8101 Cameron Road.
Suite 206
Austin, TX 78754
(512) 798-2222
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