Everyone Checks the Roof Before Hurricane Season. Here's What Gets Missed.

If you were on the Northshore for Hurricane Ida in 2021, you remember the roofers. Every yard sign, every truck, every conversation for weeks was about roofs. That's not wrong — roof damage is real and expensive. But Ida also took down soffits, blew doors off their hinges, and left generators running too close to windows while families slept inside. None of that shows up on a "check your roof" checklist, because roofers check roofs. Nobody's whole-home job is checking everything else.

What actually needs a look before June

Exterior doors and garage doors. These are large surfaces that catch wind directly, and in a storm they're one of the more common failure points that isn't the roof — once a door fails, wind gets inside the house and starts working on the roof and walls from underneath, which is a different and worse problem than wind hitting a closed house from outside. Check hinges, weatherstripping, and whether the door actually seats tight in the frame. A door that's been sticking or dragging for two years isn't just an annoyance — it's telling you something about how well it still seals.

Soffit and fascia. Most homeowners couldn't point these out by name, which is exactly why they're the pieces nobody checks. Soffit that's coming loose, gapping, or was installed at the wrong angle for the roof pitch is an entry point for wind-driven rain, and it's usually invisible from the ground unless you know to look for the seam lines.

Gutters and downspouts. Gutters pulling away from the fascia, or clogged heading into hurricane season, don't just fail during the storm itself — they've often already been letting water sit against the fascia and soffit for months. That's the slow version of the same problem the storm makes fast.

Yard and exterior items. Anything that can move in 60 mph wind becomes a projectile: patio furniture, planters, propane tanks, grills, hose reels, kids' toys. Obvious once you're told, but it's the first thing forgotten once a storm is 48 hours out and everyone's focused on plywood.

Generator placement — decided now, not during an outage. CPSC's hurricane-season guidance is specific and non-negotiable: portable generators run outdoors only, at least 20 feet from the house, exhaust pointed away from windows, doors, and vents. Carbon monoxide from a generator placed too close can kill people inside a closed-up house within minutes, without warning, because it's colorless and odorless. That's not a decision to make at midnight when the power just went out — it's one to make now, while you can actually walk the yard and pick the spot.

The mistake that isn't about the house at all

The most common failure isn't anything on the property — it's going into hurricane season with no record of what the home looked like beforehand. "I'll remember" is the lazy version. The real standard is photos and video of every room and every exterior wall, dated, stored somewhere other than the one phone that might not survive the storm. MyHouseLedger is a free option built for exactly this — a permanent home record that outlasts any one phone or storm season. Louisiana homeowners who lost their only copies of storm documentation when their phones were damaged during Ida had a much harder time getting claims processed — a five-minute habit of getting this off your phone and somewhere permanent now is cheaper than any of it.

It's also worth knowing before a storm has a name, not during: Louisiana insurance guidance is consistent that most homeowners' policies carry a separate hurricane or named-storm deductible, calculated as a percentage of the home's insured value rather than a flat dollar amount, and that standard homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage — that requires a separate policy. Neither is something to discover for the first time while filing a claim.

Why this isn't a weekend fix

None of this is a single Saturday project, and treating it like one is how homes end up under-prepared anyway. A door that isn't sealing right might need new weatherstripping, or it might need the frame itself checked for square — different problems, different costs, and not something you can tell apart without someone who knows what they're looking at. Soffit and fascia issues are almost never visible from the ground in a way that tells you how bad they actually are. And by the time a named storm has a date attached to it, the people who do this professionally are already booked.

Champion Handyman's Storm Readiness Assessment covers exactly this — everything outside the roof that a homeowner isn't equipped to evaluate alone, with a written list of what's an actual risk and what isn't, done before the season gets busy.