Drones & Roofs

I run about 30 roof survey flights a year in the South Bay, and the most common question from roofers receiving my deliverables is: what am I supposed to do with this orthomosaic file? An orthomosaic is a processed image product, not a raw photo, and the workflow that produces it is not obvious from […]

The windstorm came through the Columbia River Gorge corridor in January 2024 and hit eastern Gresham harder than the forecast suggested. By the following morning, I had three calls from homeowners who had already been told by their first responders to cover their roofs before the next rain. That instruction — tarp it now —

The lot on Date Avenue in La Mesa dropped 18 feet from the back of the house to the rear property line, which is the kind of grade that makes hardscape projects invisible from ground level until they are done. In early 2024 the homeowner was turning that slope into a series of dry-set flagstone

Last spring a homeowner on a quiet Willow Glen street asked a question I hear about once a month: he had bought a $500 drone to look at his roof after a windstorm, flew it for six minutes over his 1956 ranch, and a neighbor told him he had broken federal law. Had he? The

In October 2023 I inspected a 1979 house on a wooded lot above Oswego Lake, and the roof was the reason the buyer had called me. It was cedar shake, thirty-some years old, and shaded on its north slope by three Douglas firs that had never been limbed. From the ground, with binoculars, it looked