How Long Should a New Roof Take to Settle?

Basics of Building

• If there is one rule of building homes it is that no two are exactly the same and nothing can be predicted with absolute certainty. The reality of home building is that houses can take years to settle, and there is no defining moment when an engineer can point and say that the house is finished settling. As a result, your home could finish settling over a period of just a few years, or it could take 10 years or more to completely settle. There is no way to define with absolute certainty the when of it all.

Expansion and Contraction

• All building materials expand and contract in what is known as seasonal movement. This is the natural order of things. Materials expand in the summer months when the temperatures are warm and then shrink back down in the winter months when it is cold. This natural seasonal movement affects the overall settling of a new roof, and of the entire home, because it takes years for the various elements to settle together as things continually change with the seasons.

New Addition

• With a new roof built on top of an old structure, your original structure may have stopped settling into the soil below, but the new roof is going to have to adjust to the new climate and formation of the roof itself. The various materials involved in the construction of the roof not only have to adjust to the weight of the load, but also adjust to their positioning on top of the house frame. This happens over a slow period of years that cannot be defined with exact precision. It could take three to four seasons, or it could take a decade.

Mother Nature

• Even if the house itself or your new roof structure have stopped settling after a period of years, there is one constant that can never be predicted, and that is Mother Nature. Soil can change with the weather and the surrounding conditions, and what might have been a solid base five years ago could suddenly change one winter with a particularly heavy snowfall, or after a hurricane or a heavy rain, causing the house to begin settling all over again. The best rule of thumb is to realize that houses will move continually over the course of their lifespan, and you can’t control Mother Nature.