Roofing in Ixonia, Wisconsin

Roofing In Ixonia: The Only Ixonia In The United States, Named Out Of A Hat

In January 1846 the settlers here needed a name for a new town and could not agree on one. So they wrote the letters of the alphabet on slips of paper and drew them one at a time until the draw produced something pronounceable. It produced Ixonia, on January 21, 1846, and there has never been another place in the United States with that name.

The town it split from was Union, and Union had itself split from Watertown five years earlier, in February 1841. So Ixonia and our shop are not merely close — they were the same jurisdiction inside living memory of the same families. Seven miles east on 16, about fifteen minutes door to door.

Ixonia is a town, not a city, and that changes your paperwork. There is no city building department here. Permitting runs through the Town of Ixonia and Jefferson County, it is a different process from Watertown or Jefferson, and agricultural buildings can fall under different rules again. Establishing which applies to your parcel is the first thing we do, because getting it wrong after materials are ordered is expensive.

The township covers 36.3 square miles, most of it open, and the population has nearly doubled since 1990 — from 2,789 then to 5,120 at the 2020 census. That growth is mostly larger-lot houses on land that used to be farmed, which means two things for roofs. There is very little between your house and the horizon to slow wind down, so the damage pattern here is ridge cap, exposed rake and anything projecting above the roof plane. And nearly every property has buildings that are not the house.

Those outbuildings are usually where the actual cost is. A machine shed or a pole barn is frequently larger in roof area than the house it sits behind, and it is routinely left off other contractors’ quotes — either because they do not do post-frame work or because they would rather quote the easy part. We build post-frame as well as roofing, so a barn is not something we have to hand to somebody else or talk you out of. After a hail event those metal roofs are also the best evidence on the whole property, because metal records an impact that asphalt hides. We photograph them for exactly that reason, even when the claim is really about the house.

The other thing worth saying about rural parcels is access. A crew needs somewhere to put a dumpster that is not going to sink, somewhere to stage material within reach of the building, and a route that does not cross a septic field. On a tight town lot that is a two-minute conversation. On forty acres with three buildings and a soft spring, it is worth working out before the truck arrives rather than after.

Do You Need A Roofing Permit In Ixonia?

The Town of Ixonia publishes no rule for re-roofing, so the honest answer is to ask before anything is signed: the building inspector — the town contracts inspection to Wisconsin Building Inspections — Town of Ixonia — Building Inspector. We make that call as part of the estimate, and if a permit is needed it is ours to pull and a line item on your price. The town’s published list of work that needs a permit — “A Building Permit is Required For: New Homes; Additions/remodels; Attached/Detached Structures; Solar; Plumbing; Electrical; furnace/AC/water softener; Pools.” — does not name roofing, and there is no published list of what does not. Fees are $8 per $1,000 of valuation, $100 minimum.

The answer differs town to town because SPS 320.09(2)(b) leaves permits for alterations and repairs to local ordinance. 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.

Ixonia is a town, so there is no city building department; zoning permits come from Jefferson County, and farm buildings can fall under different rules again. We establish which applies before anything is ordered.

Post-Frame Buildings, And Why The Fasteners Are The Whole Job

Most Ixonia properties have more roof area on the outbuildings than on the house, and almost all of it is metal on post-frame. That is the right choice out here — a long simple plane, a decent pitch, and a material that handles the wind exposure far better than asphalt. But metal roofs fail in a completely different way from shingle roofs, and understanding that saves a lot of money.

Panels almost never fail. Fasteners do. A screw through a metal panel relies on a rubber washer compressed to exactly the right point. Driven too loose and it never seals; driven too hard and the washer extrudes out from under the head and is finished. Then the panel expands and contracts with the temperature every single day, working against thousands of those washers, and after fifteen or twenty years a proportion of them have given up.

Which is why a “cheap re-screw” is usually money spent twice. Putting new screws into the same holes with the same washers and the same over-torqued gun gets you a few more years at best. Done properly it means oversized fasteners into fresh material, or a screw pattern moved off the old holes entirely.

The other failure point is the closures. The foam or metal pieces that seal the ribbed profile at the ridge and the eaves are what stop wind-driven rain and snow being pushed up under the panel. They are cheap, they are frequently omitted, and on an open-country building with nothing upwind they are the difference between a dry shed and a wet one.

We build post-frame as well as roofing it, so when we quote your barn we are quoting the thing we would build ourselves.