Mark from Toronto

A little knoweledge is a dangerous thing. When I purchased my North Toronto home back in 2012, a friend of mine warned me 'there's no such thing as a skylight that doesn't leak'. Sure enough, we found out very quickly that our 'renovated in 2005' home also came complete with a leaky skylight over the living room which would constantly drip around the margins on days when the rain fell heavily. This got old fast as the leak was right over our TV room couch. Since my father is a big DIY type with decades of home improvement experience and I was a gung-ho new homeowner, the first thing we did (naturally) was attempt to diagnose and fix the problem ourselves using crowdsourced knowledge, word-of-mouth advice and YouTube videos. I figured that I could lean on my dad's expertise (he's built 2 homes 'from the ground up' over the years) to get the job done right but this turned out to be very much the wrong decision in the long run. It turns out that my father, while savvy about everything else DIY related, didn't really know enough about skylights to keep us from getting into trouble. Despite multiple attempts at repair over a year long period (which included putting on an entirely new roof and re-caulking / re-sealing the whole thing with the "best" materials we could find) we STILL had water coming through the skylights after less than 12 months past a total roof replacement. Sixth times up on the roof was enough for me. I swallowed my pride and picked up the phone to call someone who actually knew what they were doing when it came to leaky Velux skylights. That's how I met Victor & A-Line Contracting. I couldn't have asked for a better experience from Victor and the A-Line crew. With less than a week before I had to head overseas on business, Victor pulled late hours more than once to head over to our place and personally get up there to do a first-hand evaluation with me at 9:30pm with flashlights in hand. He explained to me how Dad and my choice of our "best" materials was actually a terrible mismatch for our kind of project thanks to the specific type of skylight we were correcting for, as well as the grade and orientation of the roof. The materials we used might have been correct for a different purpose, but it was a bonehead fit for a project like mine. When it comes to skylights, the devil is absolutely in the details, so these little mistakes led to big mistakes and water damage once infiltration and freezing were taken into account as well as rendering our existing skylights kind of useless in the process. "You should have called me first!" No doubt Victor. Hindsight is 20/20. Within the span of a week, Victor had sourced a new (correct) match of skylights for our roof type and made the trip with his crew (on a Sunday!) to get things straightened around so that I wouldn't be stressing about the roof while I was overseas. The guys at A-Line built additional slanted kerbs up on the new skylights to correct for our roof's gentle slope and replaced the old materials that Dad and I had in place with new (correct this time) product & shingles installed with proper technique for our roof type. Some of the 'new' product couldn't be easily removed thanks to it being directly affixed to the roof itself with adhesive, so they roofed over it. Now I have two new roofs, one under the other. While they were up there, they also corrected and fixed some aspects of our DIY job that hadn't YET become a problem but WOULD have in a few years -- probably saving us tons of headache down the line. Moreover, the whole roof replacement and new skylight installation job was completed in a single workday, at a very resonable price. Fantastic. They even took every last scrap of garbage (including my old skylights) away wit them at the end of the day so I didn't have to worry about what to do with them. After six unsuccessful attempts at DIY, I am very relieved to FINALLY have the stamp of a Velux skylight expert on the whole skylight / flashing / shingles dilemma and my wife is likewise extremely relieved that the job comes with a 10-year, no-questions asked guarantee. It's good to know that if anything DOES go wrong (fingers crossed) the crew will be back to fix it right away. I appreciate that A-Line incorporated a site review from the local Velux inspector as part of their standard roofing process at no additional cost. Being unafraid of having a third party check your work is a sign of confidence and professionalism. I just wish I'd done the same thing before we decided to go it alone 12 months ago. A-Line did an amazing job turning a project like mine around in less than 7 days. Their HomeStars score is well deserved. If you have a leaky skylight, don't make the mistake I did. Call Victor and save yourself a lot of hassle.