Roofing in Columbus, Wisconsin

The Town With A Louis Sullivan Bank On The Corner

Majors Elbert Dickason and Lewis Ludington arrived in 1838 and 1839, and Dickason named the settlement after Christopher Columbus. It was a village by 1864 and a city on February 26, 1874, and unlike most towns of its size it kept its nineteenth-century center largely intact.

The reason to care, if you own a house here, is that Columbus has architecture people travel to see. The Farmers and Merchants Union Bank was designed by Louis Sullivan in 1919–20 — one of the small group of Prairie School “jewel box” banks he built late in his career, and a nationally recognized landmark. The Whitney Hotel dates from 1858 and the railroad depot from 1906. Downtown Columbus was convincing enough as a period street that it stood in for a bank robbery in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies in 2009. Every May the Redbud Festival crowns a prince and princess and celebrates a locally developed strain of redbud tree.

What that means for roofs is that Columbus has a real concentration of Victorian and early-century housing: steep pitches, towers, cross-gables, dormers, decorative ridge detail, and roofs originally covered in slate or wood shake. Almost every one of them has been re-covered in asphalt at some point in the last seventy years, and the quality of that re-cover is the single biggest variable in the condition of the roof today.

Done well, asphalt on a steep Victorian lasts a long time, because the pitch sheds water fast and nothing sits. Done badly — original flashing left in place, valleys woven with shingle instead of lined with metal, ventilation ignored entirely because the house never had any — and the water goes into a hundred-year-old structure where it is expensive and slow to find. We have opened up valleys on houses in this town and found three generations of patching underneath.

The other thing worth knowing is that Columbus is the quietest town on our list for hail, and one of the windiest. Only 11 recorded storms since 2005 — the fewest anywhere we work — and the largest hailstone ever measured here is a single one inch stone in November 2022. Sitting at the northern edge of the corridor, Columbus catches systems that have already crossed Dodge County and spent most of their hail.

What they have not spent is wind. 9 of those 11 events are straight-line wind, and on July 13, 2015 a 100 mile an hour gust was recorded here — the strongest reading at any town in our service area. In 2008 it was 84 miles an hour. So the risk profile in Columbus is unusual and specific: your roof is unlikely to be ended by hail and quite likely to be tested at the edges by wind, which on a steep Victorian with original flashing and a hundred-year-old ridge is exactly where it is most vulnerable.

Do You Need A Roofing Permit In Columbus?

No. The City of Columbus publishes that a re-roof needs no permit: “Building Permits are not required for siding replacement, window repair or replacement, or roofing tear off and replacement.” — City of Columbus — Building Permits and Inspection Requests. Siding is exempt on the same list, and same-size windows and doors too. We check the parcel before quoting, because a mailing address does not tell you which jurisdiction you are in.

No permit does not mean no rules: SPS 320.04(2) makes the work comply with the state code whether or not anyone inspects it. If a quote carries a permit line for a straight re-roof here, ask to see the permit. Anything unusual — a change of pitch, structural work, a dumpster in the street — is a phone call to the building department.

Planning A Replacement Instead Of Reacting To One

Because Columbus is the quietest town we cover for severe weather, most roofs here reach the end of their lives on schedule rather than being ended by a storm. That is a genuinely better position to be in, and it is worth using.

A storm replacement is decided by an adjuster’s schedule, a supplement negotiation and whichever contractor has capacity in the two weeks after a regional event. A planned replacement is decided by you. You can get three quotes without a tarp on the roof, choose your material rather than accept what is in stock, book the work for a dry stretch in the spring, and pay for it out of a budget rather than a scramble.

The way to get there is to find out where you stand about three years before you need to. On a Columbus house that generally means an inspection somewhere around year seventeen or eighteen of the current roof, which tells you whether you are looking at two years or six. We will put that in writing, and if the answer is that you have six, that is what the report says.

On the older houses near the downtown there is a second reason not to leave it. A steep, tall, cut-up Victorian roof needs proper access — staging rather than ladders — and it is genuinely more work than a modern roof. Contractors who can do that well are not sitting idle, and the good windows in the calendar get taken early. Deciding in March that you would like it done in June is a very different conversation from deciding in October that it has to be done before the snow.

None of which is an argument for doing it sooner than you need to. It is an argument for knowing.