Exterior repair

The outside of a Michigan house takes a beating twice a year. Exterior repair is the work that keeps a small opening from turning into a framing problem: a siding panel that has come loose, a run of fascia gone soft, a downspout dumping water four feet from the foundation. Wright’s Repairs takes those jobs at a size most remodelers will not put on a schedule. We are not selling you a new elevation. We are closing the holes before the freeze finds them.

What a Michigan winter does to the outside of your house

Southeast Michigan runs through roughly seventy freeze and thaw cycles between November and March. Water gets into a gap at forty degrees, expands at twenty eight, and makes the gap bigger. Do that seventy times and a hairline crack in a mortar joint becomes a place where a squirrel can get in. Almost every exterior call we take in spring traces back to something that was a ten dollar problem the previous October.

Water that has nowhere to go

The single most common cause of a wet basement corner in Washtenaw County is not the foundation. It is a downspout that ends at the wall. A roof sheds a lot of water in a Michigan thunderstorm, and all of it lands in one spot. Moving that discharge away from the house is a short visit, and it solves a problem people spend far more money chasing from the inside.

Wind, salt and the south wall

The south and west elevations age faster than the rest of the house. That is where paint chalks, where caulk joints open, and where vinyl gets brittle enough to crack when a ladder leans on it. Road salt does its own damage at grade, pitting concrete steps and corroding the anchors under a railing. We check those two walls first on any annual home check, because that is where the evidence is.

Siding that has a hole in it, not a problem

A cracked vinyl panel, a woodpecker hole in cedar, a course that came loose in a July storm. None of that needs a whole wall. Our siding repair work is panel level: unlock the course above, pull the damaged piece, set a match, lock it back down. Vinyl fades, so an exact color match on a twenty year old wall is rarely possible. We will tell you that before we order anything.

There is a point where patching stops making sense. When more than about a quarter of an elevation is failing, or the sheathing behind it is wet, the honest answer is new siding across the whole house rather than another patch. That is a design and build job on the Wright’s side, and we will hand you to that team instead of selling you four more service calls.

Soffit, fascia and the edge nobody looks at

Fascia is the board your gutter hangs on. When a gutter has been overflowing for a few seasons, that board goes punky, the hangers pull, and the gutter starts to sag, which makes the overflow worse. Soffit is the underside, and it is where birds and squirrels get into an attic. Soffit and fascia repair closes the opening and replaces the rotted length rather than covering it.

We usually find this from the ground in October, when the leaves are down and the shadow line along the eave is visible. If the gutter itself is the cause, gutter repair happens in the same visit. Fixing the board without fixing what soaked it means we will both be back here next year.

Downspouts, splash blocks and the wet corner

Downspout extension and drainage is the cheapest insurance on this list. We add rigid extensions, bury a line to daylight where the grade allows, or set a splash block and correct the slope of the soil in the first six feet. On houses with a below grade window near the discharge, window well covers keep the well from filling every time it rains hard.

This is the first thing we look at on any water damage prevention visit. Interior symptoms get blamed on the foundation constantly. Before anyone opens a wall, it is worth ruling out four feet of downspout and a low spot in the yard.

After a storm, before the next one

A limb through a window at nine at night is not a remodeling project. It is a hole in your house. We board up the opening, dry in what is exposed, and document the damage with photographs your insurer can use. Permanent work follows once the adjuster has been out and the scope is settled.

Glass on its own is a separate and much smaller job. Window glass repair covers a cracked pane or a failed seal that has fogged the unit. A damaged storm door installation from the same storm often gets handled in the same trip, since the crew is already at that elevation with the ladder set.

The posts, numbers and hardware at the curb

Some exterior work is about how the house reads from the street. A leaning mailbox post, house numbers a delivery driver cannot find at dusk, a light fixture with a cracked lens. Mailbox post replacement sets a new post below the frost line so it does not lean again by March, and address numbers and exterior hardware covers the small metal that dates a front entry.

Two more front of house jobs land here often. Power washing takes the green film off north facing siding and walkways, and concrete repair handles the spalled step edge and the tripping lip where a slab has heaved. Both are common asks before a house goes on the market.

Seasonal work that shows up every year

Two jobs on this hub are calendar driven rather than condition driven. Holiday lighting installation gets the roofline done by someone who is comfortable on a ladder in November, then comes back in January to take it down and box it. Mulch and bed edging is the April version, cutting a clean edge and refreshing beds before everything greens up.

Both book out early. Lighting fills up in the first two weeks of November across Washtenaw and Wayne counties, and mulch goes the moment the ground dries. If you already know you want either one, tell us in the fall when we are out for something else.

Sealing the house before the freeze

Air leaks are an exterior problem that shows up on an interior bill. Draft sealing and weatherization covers the rim joist, the penetrations where a dryer vent or a hose bibb goes through the wall, and the caulk joints that opened over the summer. It pairs naturally with the work to winterize the house before the first hard freeze.

Here is what a crew checks on an exterior seal visit:

• Every penetration through the wall, including vents, spigots and cable entries
• Caulk joints at trim, corners and around window and door casings
• The rim joist from inside, since that is where the biggest loss usually is
• Attic access points and the soffit vents that should stay open
• Grade and drainage in the first six feet, because wet soil freezes harder

Where the outside gets in above and below

Two parts of the house sit on the boundary and get ignored because nobody walks through them. An attic with thin or displaced insulation melts snow on the roof deck, which refreezes at the cold eave and builds the ice dam that backs water under the shingles. Adding attic insulation to current depth is the fix that actually removes the cause, and it is cheaper than the ceiling repair that follows a bad February.

Underneath, a dirt floored crawl space pushes moisture into the framing all summer and into your floors all winter. A crawl space vapor barrier is a one day job on most houses in this area, and it changes how the first floor feels in January more than people expect.

The vent that runs from your dryer to the outside wall belongs in the same conversation. Lint packs the last few feet where the duct meets the hood, the flap stops closing, and cold air comes straight back in. We handle dryer vent cleaning and, when the duct itself is crushed or the old flex has gone brittle, full dryer vent replacement out to a proper hood.

Leaving the house empty for the winter

Plenty of our Monroe and Livingston County clients are gone from January to March. The failures that hurt in an empty house are almost never dramatic at the start. A hose left on a spigot freezes the valve behind the wall, splits it, and nothing happens until someone turns the water back on in April. Replacing a frost free hose bibb before you leave takes an hour.

For the months you are away, snowbird home watch puts somebody inside the house on a schedule, and water leak response is the number your neighbor or your alarm company calls when something has already let go. A walk through in December is worth more than either one.

What we look at before a house sits empty:

• Exterior spigots, shutoffs and any line running through an unheated space
• Gutters and downspouts, cleared so meltwater has somewhere to go
• Sump discharge, checked for a frozen or disconnected run to daylight
• Every exterior door and window, latched and sealed rather than just closed
• Grade at the foundation, so thaw water runs away from the wall

Exterior work we hand to someone else

We do not reroof houses. Small roof repairs and chimney repair are limited in scope, and anything past that goes to a roofer we know. Tree work goes to an arborist. The full list of work we do not take is published, because a referral on the phone costs you less than a visit that ends in one.

Bigger outdoor projects move to the other side of the company. Deck repair handles a soft board or a loose railing, and we can replace the boards on a frame that is still sound. A structure that has failed at the posts becomes new deck construction instead. A fence repair follows the same rule: sections yes, a new run no.

How an exterior repair visit actually runs

You send a photo of the elevation and tell us what you are seeing. We give you a written scope and a flat price before a truck leaves Platt Road. Most exterior repairs are a single visit, weather permitting, and we will move a date rather than caulk in the rain and have you call us back in April. The long form version of our approach is on the page about how we work.

If the repair turns out to be a symptom, we say so on site rather than in a change order. A fascia board that is wet at both ends is telling you something about the roof edge. You get that information while you can still decide what to do with it, alongside a price for the work as scoped.

Small exterior jobs group well, and grouping them is how you keep the cost down. A crew already set up with ladders on the north elevation can clear the gutter, reset two hangers, replace the cracked panel below it and extend the downspout in the same afternoon. Booked one at a time across three visits, the same work costs meaningfully more and takes three months of calendar. Send the whole list, even the parts you think are too minor to mention.

Where we work across Southeast Michigan

Our crews run out of Ypsilanti and cover Washtenaw, Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston and Monroe counties. Housing stock changes a lot across that map. The prewar houses in Ann Arbor have wood soffits and real fascia boards, so rot is a carpentry repair. Post war ranches in Livonia are mostly aluminum and vinyl, where the fix is a panel swap.

Closer to the lake in Monroe, wind exposure drives more of the damage we see. Crews are scheduled by geography, so a single downspout job in Canton gets grouped with other work in that direction rather than eating a whole day of drive time.

Older neighborhoods change the work again. A craftsman or foursquare in Ypsilanti often has original trim profiles that no lumberyard stocks, so a rotted section gets milled to match rather than swapped for something close. That takes longer and it is the right call on a house where the details are the reason somebody bought it. The same logic runs through our work on historic homes on the design and build side.

Related repairs and packages

Exterior work often continues inside. It pairs with window repair, door repair and the boards and railings out back, and it shows up in keeping water away from the house and winterizing a house before the cold sets in.

Get the outside buttoned up

Exterior repair is seasonal in Michigan whether you plan for it or not. The window for caulk, paint and concrete closes when overnight temperatures stop cooperating, and it does not open again until spring. If something on the outside of your house has been on your list since summer, this is the month to deal with it.

Want to see finished work before you call? View our Portfolio for the design and build side of the company, or read about a complete exterior makeover and the broader full exterior renovation work if your list has outgrown a repair. Otherwise, contact us now for a free quote.