Most homeowners have never seen what actually happens during a roof inspection. A truck shows up, someone climbs a ladder, disappears for a while, and comes back down with a verdict. That gap is exactly where bad actors operate, and it’s why we filmed one of ours from start to finish.

The video above is a real inspection at a customer’s home in Sterling, Colorado, a few weeks after a serious hailstorm rolled through. Here’s everything Jake checks up there, in the order he checks it, and why each step matters.

Quick Answer: What Does a Roof Inspection Include?

Step 1: The Soft Metals Tell the Truth First

The first place we look isn’t the shingles. It’s the roof vents and flashings, what roofers call the soft metals. Hail dents these long before it does visible damage to anything else, and the dents are surprisingly hard to see with the naked eye.

The trick is chalk. Run a piece of chalk sideways across a vent and every dent suddenly shows up as a clean outline. In the video you can watch dents appear on a vent that looked fine seconds earlier. That’s not a gimmick. It’s evidence, and it’s the same evidence an insurance adjuster will respect.

While we’re up there, we also count every vent and flashing and mark the counts in chalk right on the roof. When a roof gets replaced, all of the ventilation and flashings get replaced with it, so those counts end up in the claim and the estimate. If ventilation seems like a strange thing to care about, we wrote a whole post on why bad ventilation quietly kills Denver roofs.

Chalk washes away with the next rain. A photo of what it revealed lasts through the whole claim.

Step 2: The 10×10 Test Square

This is the part of the inspection most homeowners have never heard of, and it’s the one that decides everything.

We mark out a 10 foot by 10 foot square on the slope, the same test area an insurance adjuster uses when they inspect a claim. Then we count damaged shingles inside it. Not individual hail hits. Damaged shingles. The threshold that matters is ten or more damaged shingles in the square.

Hit that number and the typical outcome is that the entire slope needs replacement, not a patch job. In the Sterling video, the square blew past ten almost immediately, so Jake marks the slope “R = 10+” in chalk, photographs it, and moves on.

Why mimic the insurance inspection?

Because it means no surprises. If our test square says the roof qualifies, we can recommend you start a claim with confidence, and when the adjuster shows up and runs the same test, the numbers match. If it doesn’t qualify, we tell you that too, and you’ve lost nothing but an hour.

Step 3: Every Slope, Not Just the Bad One

One slope with obvious damage doesn’t tell you about the other three. Hail rarely falls evenly, and wind direction during the storm means one side of your roof can be hammered while another is nearly untouched.

So the test square gets repeated on all four sides of the roof, each one marked and photographed. That slope-by-slope picture is what separates “your whole roof is totaled” from “you need two slopes replaced” from “you’re fine.” Each of those is a very different conversation with your insurance company, and you want the evidence sorted out before that conversation starts.

Step 4: The Full Photo Report (Even If Nothing’s Wrong)

After the roof is marked up, everything gets photographed and compiled into a full photo report. And here’s the part we think matters most: you get that report no matter what we find. Damage on half the roof, a quarter of it, the whole thing, or none of it at all.

The report ends with one of three recommendations:

• Don’t worry about anything. The roof is in good shape, here are the photos to prove it, see you in a year or two.
• Get some minor repairs done. Small issues, fixed cheaply now, before they become water damage later.
• Start an insurance claim. There’s enough damage that the roof is likely a total, and it’s time to get your insurance company out to look at it.

If it’s door number three, the photo report becomes the backbone of your claim. If you’re wondering what a replacement actually runs these days, our breakdown of roof replacement cost in Denver has real numbers by home size.

Step 5: Hail Doesn’t Stop at the Roofline

A roof-only inspection after a hailstorm misses half the story. Hail that’s big enough to total a roof usually left marks elsewhere, so the inspection continues on the ground:

• Siding and stucco, checked for cracks, chips, and impact marks.
• Windows, including screens and wraps, which shred easily in hail.
• Gutters and downspouts. In the video there’s a dent you can spot from the ground, pushed outward from the inside of the gutter where a hailstone landed.
• Fence and deck stain, which hail can strip and pit.

All of it goes in the same report, because all of it can belong in the same claim. Homeowners who only claim the roof routinely leave thousands of dollars of legitimate exterior damage on the table.

No Hail? You Should Still Do This Every 18 Months

Even without a storm, we recommend a roof inspection about every 18 months. Small maintenance items fail quietly. A classic example from the video: exposed fasteners are sealed with silicone, and that silicone dries out and disappears over time. It costs almost nothing to reseal and a lot to ignore, because the failure mode is water inside your house.

An 18-month rhythm means someone lays eyes on those details before they become a problem, and it means you always have a recent photo baseline of your roof’s condition. If a storm hits next spring, you’ll have before-and-after documentation ready to go.

The Bottom Line

A real roof inspection isn’t someone glancing at your shingles from a ladder. It’s chalk on the soft metals, a 10×10 test square on every slope, a walk around the whole exterior, and a photo report you keep regardless of the verdict. That’s the standard worth holding any contractor to, especially the ones knocking on doors after a storm. If a bid or an inspection feels thin, our guide on how to compare roofing quotes shows you exactly what should be in it.