The first step to dealing with roof leaks is prevention. Your roof should get a visual examination every spring and fall. Either get up there yourself to go through a checklist appropriate for your kind of roof (you can find these online), or have a professional roofer stop by and take a look at things. While it is impossible to prevent all roof leaks, making sure your roof stays in top condition can dramatically cut down on the number of roof leaks that your home has.

The second step is consistently checking for roof leaks. This takes place on all floors of your home but primarily the top floor or the attic if you have one. Look for wet spots in the insulation or puddles of water on the attic floor. Roof leaks affecting the top floor often present themselves as wet spots on the ceiling or streaking water down the wall. Do not just check for such things when it is raining. Sometimes it takes hours for the water to penetrate, and in snowy areas, ice dams melting might leak into the house even on a sunny day.

Once you do find signs of a water leak, take prompt action. Clean up some of the moisture, but do not clean it up so much that the damage becomes invisible. This advice might seem counterintuitive, but you need to call out a roofing specialist and professional as soon as you can, and he or she needs to see what is going on in order to try and find the source of the leak. That is the hardest part of the process, locating the exact spot that needs fixed. Once they do, clean up the inside to your heart’s content.