Skylight Installation in Rowlett, TX
Find out what a skylight installation or a leak repair involves and what it will cost before you commit to it. Our roofers itemize every line on the estimate.
A leaking skylight is rarely a broken skylight
What keeps water out of a skylight is the metal and the curb around it, and that assembly is where the failures start. The glazing arrives as a sealed factory unit. The flashing is field work, cut and formed on your roof, and field work is what moves, weathers and lets go. That is why pulling the glass is so often the wrong first move.
So what you're deciding isn't really about the skylight. It's about the seam it sits in and how much life your roof has left around it, because a unit set back under new shingles carries the old flashing's problems along with it. Our roofers hold an older unit and a newer one to the same standard, and the answers come back different because the roofs around them are different. Start with Rowlett Roofworks and you'll hear which of those two you're in before anybody talks about work. You walk away with the curb and flashing photographed.
What Rowlett skylight work covers
Most of what a skylight call turns into is metal and carpentry, not glasswork. The courses around the opening come up, the old flashing comes off, and the wood underneath gets looked at before anything new goes back down.
- 01The flashing kit
- Skylights ship with metal shaped for that exact model and that pitch. A generic bend and a bead of sealant is not the same part.
- 02The curb it sits on
- Deck-mounted units sit straight on the sheathing, and curb-mounted ones sit on a raised wood frame built around the hole. Which one you have decides how much of the opening has to be rebuilt.
- 03Wood around the opening
- Water past the head flashing lands on decking and framing long before it reaches your ceiling. Anything gone soft comes out while the hole is open.
- 04The unit, when it's due
- A skylight already at the end of its years doesn't go back under a fresh roof. Pulling it while the courses are open is a fraction of the work of reaching it later.
If the metal turns out to be sound and the water is coming from somewhere else on that slope, it's a roof repair and it's priced as one.
Why the courses come up before the unit
Flashing only works in one direction. Every piece laps the one below it, so the metal around a skylight has to be rebuilt from the low side upward with the shingle courses lifted and set back in the same weave. That's the standard this work is held to, and it's why the unit itself is the last thing to move.
Read it from below
Our roofers start where there's attic to get into, because the track water leaves on the underside of the deck says whether it came in at the skylight or somewhere uphill of it. Condensation leaves a different mark than a leak does.
Lift the courses
The shingles above and beside the unit come up so the old metal is reachable. What's under them gets photographed before anything closes back over it.
Set the kit
New flashing goes back in the order the maker shaped it for, low pieces first, with the courses weaving over the top of it. Caulk has a job at the very end and no job in place of the metal.
Signs a Rowlett skylight is leaking at the curb
A skylight leak travels before it shows. Water gets past the head of the unit, runs the curb to its low corner, then follows a rafter until it finds a seam in your ceiling, which is why the mark inside often sits a few feet off to one side.
- Stains off to one side: the ceiling mark shows up beside the skylight shaft instead of under the glass, which is the way curb water usually travels.
- Drips only in driving rain: wind pushes water up under the head flashing, so a steady vertical downpour never shows you the problem.
- Water with no rain at all: cold glass and warm damp air make condensation, and it runs down the shaft in exactly the pattern a leak would.
- Fog between the panes: that is the unit's own seal letting go, which is a glass problem and not a roof one.
- Browning in the light well: the drywall shaft under the unit stains at its corners while the ceiling around it stays clean.
Two of those point at air instead of water. If the drips only turn up on cold mornings, the source is likely inside the house, and if you can't tell which one you have, a roof inspection settles it before anything is opened up.
Mounting, parts, and how far the water got
Two skylights on two roofs a street apart can be very different jobs. What separates them is how the unit is mounted, whether metal for that model is still made, how far the water traveled through the deck before it showed inside, and how reachable that part of the roof is.
The bigger lever is timing. A skylight handled while the roof around it is already open is a different piece of work than a skylight reached on its own, and the roof cost page takes the same question from the whole-roof side.
What moves a Rowlett roof price- Curb-mounted or deck-mounted, and how it was framed
- Whether flashing for that model is still made
- How far water ran through the deck
- Pitch, height, and how reachable the opening is
- One unit or several on the same slope
- Whether the shaft below needs drywall work
What a skylight asks of the roof around it
A skylight is the one opening in a plane the rest of the roof spends its life keeping solid. Everything that keeps it dry sits at its edges, and those edges age with the roof instead of with the window.
Around Rowlett that matters twice over. Rain here usually arrives with wind behind it, and a skylight is the one place on a roof where water can be pushed uphill.
- 01Rain with wind behind it
- Wind pushes rain up and under the top edge of a unit, and that is the one direction the metal there is not built to shed. It is why some skylights only leak in a storm and stay dry through an ordinary rain.
- 02What the slope above it hands down
- A unit set low on a plane, or below a valley, takes the water off the whole surface above it. The metal at its top edge and the small saddle behind it carry that water around, and the amount of roof above decides how much they have to move.
Telling those two apart takes one of our roofers up beside the unit, because each leaves the water in a different place. What a storm leaves across the rest of the roof is covered on the hail and storm damage page.
Skylight questions from Rowlett homeowners
The ones that decide whether a skylight stays or goes.
Q1My roof is being replaced. Does the skylight have to come out with it?
Q2Do skylights always leak eventually?
Q3Water is running down the inside of the shaft and it hasn't rained in days.
Q4Can the flashing just be resealed instead of rebuilt?
Have your Rowlett skylight looked at
Say which room your skylight sits over and what you're seeing around the frame. One of our roofers gets up there and goes over the metal around the opening, so you know what's wrong before you decide anything. If the answer turns out to be a repair, that is what you will be told.