Chimney and Roof Flashing Repair in Franklin County, MO

If your roof leaks near a chimney, skylight, or vent pipe, the shingles are almost never the problem. The flashing is. Flashing is the thin metal that seals every spot where your roof meets something it cannot shingle over, and it is the number-one source of roof leaks in Franklin County homes.

This guide walks through how each type of flashing works, why it fails, the warning signs inside your house, and what an honest repair actually looks like. Emmendorfer Exteriors has roofed 2,400-plus Missouri homes since 1990 with in-house family crews, so we see flashing failures every week across Union, Washington, Pacific, and the rest of the county.

Shingles shed water across a flat field of roof, but they cannot seal a corner, a wall, or a hole. Anywhere your roof changes direction or something pokes through it, water needs a metal channel to guide it back onto the shingles. That metal is flashing, and it lives at chimneys, sidewalls, skylights, valleys, and vent pipes.

Those transition points take the most stress. Sun, freeze-thaw cycles, and a settling chimney work the metal loose long before the shingles wear out. So a roof with ten good years left will still leak at the chimney. That is why a leak almost always traces back to flashing, not the shingle field around it.

The fix is rarely a whole new roof. A flashing leak caught early is a targeted repair. Ignored, the water rots decking and framing under the chimney, and a one-day repair turns into a structural one. Catching it early is the whole game.

A wide chimney, typically anything over about 30 inches across, needs a cricket. A cricket, also called a saddle, is a small peaked structure built on the up-slope side of the chimney. It splits water and debris and sends them around both sides instead of letting them pile against the brick.

Without a cricket, water and wet leaves dam up behind a wide chimney. That standing water works under the flashing and rots the decking, and in a Missouri winter the freeze-thaw pries the seam open faster. A lot of older Franklin County homes were built without one, and that back wall is exactly where they start leaking.

Adding a cricket during a flashing repair or a roof replacement is a permanent fix for that problem. We frame it, deck it, and flash it as part of the system, so the most vulnerable side of your chimney finally drains the way it should.

A real repair starts on the roof, not from a ladder. We lift the surrounding shingles, remove the failed metal, and inspect the decking underneath for rot. If the wood is soft, it gets replaced before any new flashing goes down, because new metal over rotten decking just hides the next leak.

Then we install new flashing the right way for that joint: woven step flashing, counter-flashing cut into the masonry, a new pipe boot, or a cricket where the chimney needs one. We re-lay the shingles over the new metal and seal only where sealant belongs, not as the fix itself. No tar smeared over a bad joint.

Every job ends with a magnet sweep of the whole site for nails, so your yard, driveway, and tires stay safe. Because our crews are in-house family rather than subcontractors, the same Owens Corning certified standard holds whether it is a single pipe boot or a full chimney re-flash.