Replacement · tile
Tile lift-and-lay
On most tile roofs that leak, the tile is not the problem. Concrete and clay tile can outlast the felt underneath them by decades, and the felt is what actually keeps the water out. Lift-and-lay replaces the part that failed and keeps the part that did not.
Your tile roof is two roofs
The tile is a rain screen. It takes the sun, the impact, and most of the water, and it will keep doing that long after you stop owning the house. Underneath it, on the deck, is a waterproof layer that handles everything the tile lets past — wind-driven rain, water tracking up a lap, the slow drainage in a valley. That underlayment is organic felt on most Ventura County houses of a certain age, and felt has a service life.
When it reaches the end of it, you get a roof whose tile looks fine from the street and whose ceiling has a stain on it. Replacing the tile would be replacing the healthy half.
What the job is
1. Lift and stack
The tile comes off by hand and gets stacked in courses on the roof or lowered to the ground. It is not demolition. Every piece we take off is a piece we intend to put back.
2. Strip and inspect
Old felt off, deck bare, and the first honest look anyone has had at the sheathing since the house was built. Battens, valley metal, and the flashings at every wall and penetration get judged here.
3. Re-deck what failed
Sound sheathing stays. Soft sheathing is replaced, on a per-sheet allowance stated in the proposal before we start rather than discovered afterward.
4. New underlayment
The actual product you are buying. This is the layer that will decide whether the roof leaks for the next few decades, and it is the layer that failed to get you here.
5. Relay the tile
Back on, course by course, with new flashings and fresh fasteners. Broken and previously cracked pieces come out and replacements go in.
Breakage is real, and it goes in writing
Handling several thousand pieces of fired clay or concrete twice means some of them break. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not done it. What matters is that the estimate says so before the job: how breakage is counted, who pays for replacement pieces, and what happens if the count runs past the allowance.
Two things drive that count more than the crew does. Older concrete tile gets brittle, and a roof someone has already walked badly is carrying hairline cracks that only announce themselves when a boot finds them. Both are visible at the assessment, which is why we want to be on the roof before we quote one of these.
The question to ask early: is your profile still made?
Tile profiles get discontinued. If yours is one of them, replacement pieces come from salvage rather than a supplier, and that changes both the lead time and how carefully the tile has to be handled coming off. It is worth finding out at the assessment rather than mid-job. Where a match cannot be found, the usual answer is to move salvaged tile to the street-facing slopes and put the closest available match where it shows least.
Roof Maxx does not go on tile
Ever. The treatment is an oil that soaks into an asphalt shingle and restores its flexibility, and tile has no asphalt in it to restore. If a tile roof is leaking, the answer is underlayment, flashing, or repair — never a rejuvenation, whoever offers it.
What rejuvenation actually is, and what it is forWhen it is repair instead
Not every tile roof needs the whole thing lifted. A single failed valley, one bad wall flashing, or a run of slipped tile is a repair, and it is the right call when the rest of the underlayment still has life in it. We would rather sell you the repair and come back in ten years than lift a roof that did not need lifting.