The roof leaked and damaged my ceiling. Who fixes what?
One leak leaves two jobs. The roof has to be made watertight, and the ceiling, insulation and anything below it has to be repaired. Split between a roofer and a drywall contractor, the second job usually waits weeks and each company points at the other over what caused what.
The order is not negotiable
The roof comes first. Closing a ceiling under an active leak is money spent twice, and no honest contractor will finish the interior until the water is stopped and the cavity is dry.
Dry means measured, not guessed. Insulation holds water long after the drywall surface feels normal to the hand.
Inside the house, after the roof is watertight
The affected board comes out. The framing and insulation above it get inspected while they are visible, since wet insulation is compressed insulation and no longer doing its job.
New board goes up, gets finished and texture matched, then primed with a stain blocking primer before paint. On a ceiling the finish is normally carried across the whole plane rather than stopped at the patch, because a repair square in a ceiling shows in daylight from anywhere in the room.
What people underestimate
Water travels. A stain on the ceiling in one room often means wet insulation over two, and water that ran along a joist before it found a seam to come through. The stain marks where it exited, not where it entered.
That is why the interior scope is written after the ceiling is opened rather than from the size of the stain.
Why one company changes the outcome
We run roofing and drywall, so the roof repair and the ceiling rebuild are one project with one schedule and one estimate. Nobody has to negotiate between two contractors about whether the interior damage was caused by the leak.
On an insurance claim that also matters for the paperwork, because the roof and the interior appear in the same documented scope instead of two unrelated ones.
The Work Behind This Answer
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