After a storm, most homeowners take three or four photographs, call someone, and start cleaning up. On a slate roof that sequence loses information that is difficult or impossible to recover, and the loss usually shows up weeks later when someone asks what the roof looked like before the debris was hauled off.
Slate is a harder thing to document than asphalt. Damage is localized rather than broad. A hailstorm that shreds an asphalt roof may leave a slate roof with four cracked pieces and a bent valley, all of which are invisible from the street. Wind that peels a whole section of shingles will often take individual slates from scattered places on one slope. Age is also part of the picture in a way it is not with asphalt, because slate has a service life measured in decades, commonly 75 to 150 years depending on the stone, and the condition of the rest of the roof affects how any single area of damage gets treated.
What follows is a list of what to capture and keep. It takes about half an hour. It is worth doing before anyone touches the roof, including us.
Photograph from fixed positions, and repeat them later
The most useful photographs are not close ups. They are wide shots taken from spots you can stand in again. Pick four positions, one per side of the house, far enough back that the full roof plane is in frame, and mark them mentally by something permanent: the corner of the driveway, the second fence post, the far side of the mailbox.
From each position take one wide shot with the phone at normal zoom, then a set of zoomed shots working across the slope. Then walk the same four positions again a week later, a month later, and after the next storm. A sequence from the same spot shows what changed and when. A pile of close ups taken from wherever you happened to stand shows almost nothing about sequence.
Confirm your phone is recording date, time, and location with the photos, and do not crop, filter, rotate, or forward them through a messaging app that compresses images. Send full resolution originals when you send them to anyone. Back them up somewhere off the phone the same day.
Exterior details that matter on slate
- Gaps in the field. A missing slate leaves a clean rectangle of felt or bare deck. Photograph it with enough surrounding roof in frame that its position on the slope is identifiable later.
- Cracked but still hanging pieces. These matter as much as missing ones and are easy to overlook. Look for a hairline that runs from an edge toward a nail head.
- The ridge and hips. Ridge slates and the mortar or metal at the ridge take the most wind.
- Valleys, chimneys, and dormer sidewalls. Photograph the metal, not just the stone. Lifted valley edges and counterflashing pulled out of a mortar joint are common storm damage and are easy to miss.
- Gutters and the ground. Photograph fragments where they lie before collecting them. Where a piece landed tells you roughly where it came from.
- Trees and limbs. If a limb came down, photograph the limb, the impact area, and the distance between them.
Interior and attic
Photograph every wet ceiling and wall from the doorway of the room, then close. Include something for scale. If water is actively running, take a short video, because a still photograph of a drip conveys nothing about volume. In the attic, photograph the wet underside of the deck with the flashlight held low across the sheathing so the wet area reads clearly, and note which rafter bay it sits in by counting from the gable end.
Do all of this before stabilization if it is safe to wait. If water is pouring in, containment comes first and photographs come second. A crew arriving for emergency roof repair on a slate roof will normally photograph the damage before placing a cover, so ask for those images and keep them with your own.
Keep the physical evidence
Pieces of broken slate on the ground are the single most useful thing a homeowner can save, and they are almost always thrown away.
A fragment tells a roofer several things at once. The color and grain narrow down the quarry, which matters because Buckingham stone from Virginia, Vermont stone, Pennsylvania stone, and imported stone all behave differently and are sourced differently. The thickness sets what the replacement needs to be. The break itself is diagnostic: a clean fracture across sound stone suggests impact, while a piece that delaminates into flakes in your hand suggests the stone is at the end of its life, which is a different conversation entirely.
Put the fragments in a box, not a bag, and keep them dry. Also keep any metal that came off the roof: a length of valley, a piece of step flashing, a ridge cap. Old copper is often the clearest evidence of how a roof was originally built and where it had been repaired before.
If a tree limb caused the damage, keep a section of it or at least photograph it at scale before it goes into the chipper.
Records that are easy to get now and hard to get later
Photographs describe the roof. Records describe the event and the condition of the roof beforehand, and both matter.
- Weather data for the date. Save the observed wind gusts, hail reports, and rainfall totals for your location on the day in question, from the National Weather Service office covering central Virginia or from a local airport station. Save it as a dated screenshot or PDF while it is easy to find.
- Any prior inspection report. A report from before the storm establishes what the roof looked like beforehand. If you have never had one, having a record of condition now is still worth more than having nothing, and a documented slate roof inspection gives you a baseline for the next event.
- Records of past work. Invoices, receipts, and photographs from previous repairs show which areas were already addressed and when.
- A written log of the event. A few lines with the date, the time you first noticed water, which rooms were affected, and what you did. Written the same day, this is more reliable than memory.
- Your policy documents. Read what your policy says about roof coverage and about deadlines for reporting. Coverage terms vary widely, and older slate roofs are handled differently by different carriers.
Keep insurance expectations open. Documentation improves the quality of the conversation with an adjuster because it replaces argument with dated evidence, but nobody can tell you in advance how a specific claim will be handled. What documentation reliably does is make the repair scope accurate.
How documentation changes the repair
Good records shift the decision from guesswork to evidence. If your photographs and the fragments show sound stone with localized impact damage, the roof is a repair, often a small one. If the fragments crumble and the wide shots show delamination and slipped pieces across every slope, the storm may have simply accelerated a roof that was already at the end of its service life, and the honest answer is a phased slate roof replacement rather than a repair that will be followed by another one next spring.
Local building stock is part of this too. Many of the slate roofs on older houses around Altavista are original to the house, which means the stone has been in service for the better part of a century and the nails are frequently more tired than the slate. Documentation that shows slates sliding out intact, with no cracks, points at fastener failure rather than storm impact, and that distinction changes what a competent repair looks like.
Common questions
Should I get on the roof to take better pictures?
No. A phone at full zoom from the ground, or from a ladder set at the eave, will show a cracked slate clearly enough. Walking a slate roof breaks sound pieces, and after a storm the slates around the damaged area are the ones most likely to break underfoot. Photographs taken from a second story window of an adjacent wing, or from a neighbor’s yard with a longer sight line, are often better than anything taken from on the roof.
How soon do I need to do this?
The same day if you can, and certainly before any cleanup. Ceiling stains fade to a pale ring, fragments get raked up, and limbs get cut. Once those are gone the record of what happened is gone with them.
Do I need a drone or a professional photographer?
No. A current phone camera is sufficient for everything described here. What matters is that the images are full resolution, unedited, dated, and taken from positions you can return to. A roofer or an adjuster will take their own detailed images later.
Should I call before or after I document?
Call first if water is actively coming into the house, and document while you wait. Call after documenting if the damage is visible but the interior is dry. Either way, take the wide shots before anyone puts a ladder up, because a cover placed over the damage hides exactly the thing you would want to show.
Bring us what you have
Once you have your photographs, your fragments, and your notes, we can tell you a great deal before we ever set a ladder. Send the images at full resolution and keep the broken stone for us to look at. Call +15555555555 to schedule an inspection.
