Garland TX Roofing: Spring Hail, September Surprises, and a City Whose Median House Went Up in 1978

A North Texas hailstorm can do its work in a matter of minutes. On the evening of September 24, 2023, NOAA’s Storm Events Database logged five hail reports on the north side of Garland within eight minutes, with stones reported at 1.00, 2.25, 1.25, 1.75 and 2.00 inches. A few minutes under a passing hail core is often all it takes to decide the rest of a Garland roof’s life.

The age of the city explains the rest. Garland holds 246,018 people across 57 square miles, third largest in Dallas County and thirteenth largest in Texas, with pieces reaching into Collin and Rockwall. It is also not a new city: the median home here was built in 1978, and roughly two in three houses standing today went up between 1960 and 1989. Put a decade of North Texas hail on stock that age and the result is not subtle.

R&S is a family business, owned by Remington and Sarah McDermott, six years in and GAF Certified. We serve Garland from our Dallas-Fort Worth office at 108 Belden Circle in McKinney, about 25 miles up the road.

Hail Season Here Has a Shape, and It Is Worth Knowing

Many homeowners think of hail as something that happens at random. In North Texas it follows a pattern: the bulk of it falls between March and June, when spring supercells fire along the dryline and track east across the metroplex. NOAA’s Storm Events Database lists 186 hail reports in Dallas County from 2015 to 2024, spread across 61 separate days, and 22 of them reported stones 2 inches across or larger. Of those 186 reports, 148 (about four in five) fell between March and June, with April the busiest month at 51, followed by June at 35 and May at 34.

Late-season storms are the ones that catch people off guard. Hail can still arrive in September and later in the fall, long after most people have stopped thinking about it. September accounted for 18 of those Dallas County reports, more than any other month outside the March to June window. North Texas thunderstorms also bring damaging straight-line wind and the occasional tornado: from 2015 to 2024, NOAA lists 140 thunderstorm wind events and 15 tornadoes in Dallas County. The scale is genuinely Texan: the Insurance Information Institute, citing National Weather Service data, counted 902 major hail events in Texas in 2025 out of 5,432 nationwide.

Why a 1970s Garland Roof Behaves Differently

Garland grew up as a postwar industrial and bedroom suburb, not a 1990s master-planned community: 10,571 people in 1950, 81,437 by 1970, 138,850 by 1980. The housing follows that curve exactly. The 1970s are the single biggest building decade here, the 1960s and 1980s sit either side of them, and only a thin slice of the city’s 86,000-odd housing units went up after 2010, mostly around Firewheel and along the President George Bush Turnpike corridor.

What that means on a roof is practical rather than theoretical. A house from that era is usually on its third or fourth covering, its decking has been through several tear-offs, and its ventilation and flashing answer to a code book rewritten more than once since. On stock this old it is also common to find a roof laid straight over the last one instead of stripped.

So we look past the shingle field. What condition is the decking really in, is the attic actually ventilated or does it merely have vents on it, and did the last crew renew the pipe boots and valley flashing or put the old ones back? That is where the surprises live, and it decides whether the next roof reaches its rated life.

A Leak Is Old News by the Time You Can See It

By the time a brown ring appears on drywall, water has been getting in for a while. The signals that arrive first are duller: granules washed into the foot of a downspout, a split rubber pipe collar, a ridge cap that lifted in a windy week and never sat back down, one pinhole of daylight in the attic.

Almost none of it is exotic. On a Garland house it is usually a known weak point letting go, and the cost of putting it right depends almost entirely on how long it has been doing so. Deal with it and you have bought a roof repair. Leave it through one Texas summer and the deck turns spongy, and the job stops being roofing and starts being framing.

The Point Where Repairing Stops Paying

Selling somebody a roof they do not need is a poor way to run a six-year-old family business, so repair is our default. Past a certain point, though, a patch is money spent slowly: fresh material will not seal to shingles that have already surrendered their granules and their adhesive strip. The tells are consistent: shingles that crack instead of flex, bare mat showing through, a slope whose seal strips grip nowhere, water in two planes at once.

That conversation comes up often on houses from the 1960s and 1970s, and it is worth having properly, because a new roof is the only moment when the ventilation and flashing decisions that shortened the last covering can be undone. That is most of what separates a roof replacement that reaches twenty years from one that quits at twelve.

After a Storm: What Stays With Us, and What Does Not

Two things reliably follow a North Texas hail day: roofs that took a beating without looking like it start misbehaving, and unfamiliar trucks begin working the street. We are not the second one. Remington came into roofing from the insurance side, which is why the claim end of a job stays in-house here.

Concretely, we climb it and put the storm’s work on record (bruising, granule loss, creases, unsealed courses, dented soft metals, torn flashing) before an adjuster has settled on a view. Deciding the claim is not ours to do; that belongs to your policy and your carrier. The hail roof damage and wind roof damage pages, and the wider storm damage assessment section, set out how it runs from there.

Wind earns its own paragraph here. Straight-line thunderstorm wind attacks the edges rather than the middle (rakes, eaves, ridge, the courses above the starter strip), and a broken sealant strip never re-bonds, so a whole slope can sit unsealed with nothing visibly missing. Tornadoes are far rarer than hail, but Garland has seen them too: on October 20, 2019, an EF2 tornado tracked about 2.5 miles through the city, and NOAA’s Storm Events Database puts its property damage at $400 million.

The Inspection Is Free, and It Is an Actual Inspection

Nobody pays us to look. A roof inspection here means going up (field, eaves and rakes, ridge, valleys, flashing, boots, vents, and into the attic if there is a way in), not squinting at your house from the curb. What comes back is photographs and a verdict in plain English: fix it, replace it, or leave it and look again after the next one.

Garland Areas We Serve

All of Garland, across every county line the city crosses, including:

• Firewheel
• Naaman Forest
• Club Hill
• Eastern Hills
• Spring Park
• Centerville
• Rose Hill
• Duck Creek
• Embree
• Bethard
• Travis College Hill

Travis College Hill earns its own note: platted in 1913 by the developer R.O. Travis, it was the first place in Garland added to the National Register of Historic Places, twelve homes whose period of significance runs from 1913 to 1960. The downtown square joined it in 2017. Roofs of that vintage are their own conversation, and we are glad to have it.

Finding Our Way Around Garland

Garland makes the most sense by road rather than by ZIP code. Interstate 30 clips the south end and Interstate 635 the western edge, State Highway 78 runs through as Garland Road and Lavon Drive, State Highway 66 crosses the middle, the President George Bush Turnpike arcs over the north, and the Belt Line loop (signed in places as First Street and Broadway Boulevard) ties the older half of the city together. Two DART Blue Line stations sit inside the city too, at Downtown Garland and Forest/Jupiter.

The landmarks do the rest: Firewheel Town Center at the northeast corner of the Bush Turnpike and Highway 78, the Curtis Culwell Center on Naaman Forest Boulevard, the downtown square, and Spring Creek Forest Preserve in the north. Garland keeps 63 parks and over 2,880 acres of park land, and most of Garland Independent School District (roughly 56,000 students, fourth largest in the metroplex) sits inside these limits.

It is a genuinely different market from the Gulf Coast side of Texas. Around Katy and Cinco Ranch, much of the housing is 1990s and 2000s master-planned construction facing hurricane wind. Garland is 1960s-to-1980s brick and asphalt facing spring hail. Same company, honestly different problems.

Garland Roofing Questions We Get Asked