Work fulfilled by Micheletti Construction. Reach Micheletti Construction on WhatsApp: +234 803 667 9688. Quote requests from this page are reviewed by them. This is not a marketplace of other roofers.
The stain on the ceiling is where the water gave up, not always where it came in. Finding a roof leak is the job of following that path backwards without falling off the building and without making a second hole. You can do the safe half yourself, from inside and from the ground, and you can send what you find with a quote request. The unsafe half — walking a wet, thin, or steep sheet — belongs to someone who came equipped to be up there. Micheletti Construction would rather have a clear description than a photograph taken from a ridge you should not have been on.
Start under the stain, not on the roof
Put a bucket down if water is dripping, and look at the shape of the mark. A round, fresh drip in the middle of a board, with no track, may be almost under the entry. A long tide mark that stops against a timber is water that ran along that timber. A mark that hugs the wall is often the parapet, the window head, or wind-driven rain at the eave, not the middle of the slope.
Note the time. Water that appears within minutes of rain is a short path. Water that appears that night, or the next morning, has been held in a valley, a deck, or above a ceiling and has taken time to come through. That delay is a clue. Write it down. “It leaks when it rains” is true and useless. “It leaks the morning after, in the corner by the stair” is a description someone can use.
Look above the ceiling if you can do it through an existing hatch, with a torch, standing on a board that bears on joists and not on the plaster. Daylight through a sheet is a hole. A dark, wet purlin with a dry sheet around it may be tracking from further up the slope. If there is no hatch, do not cut one in a panic unless water is pooling enough to bring the ceiling down. A cut in the wrong place becomes the next stain.
If the drip is near a lamp or a fan, kill the circuit at the distribution board provided you can do that without standing in water. A leak hunt is not worth a shock.
Match the stain to a suspect on the outside
From the ground or a balcony, find the part of the roof that sits above the room. You are looking for a short list, not for every screw.
A pipe, a cable, a satellite mount, or a tank support in that zone is the first suspect. Cement buttered around a pipe cracks. The water then runs down the pipe and leaves the ceiling looking like a plumbing leak. If the tap is dry and the stain grows only in rain, it is still the roof using the pipe as a hole.
A valley or an internal gutter above that zone is the second suspect. Leaves, Harmattan dust, and builder’s sand collect there. The water jumps the valley when it rains hard and reappears indoors away from the valley’s centre line. In Abuja this shows up at the first storms after the dry season. In Lagos it shows up whenever a long wet season has packed the gutter and a heavier storm arrives. In Ibadan it shows up again at the second rainfall peak if you cleaned the gutter only in August and called it the annual service.
A ridge or hip above the room is the third suspect, and the one people skip because it is high and the sheet below it looks intact. Lifted ridge caps let water in at the highest point. It then travels down the laps and drops where it meets a joint in the ceiling. The stain is “in the middle of the room” and the hole is at the top.
Fastener lines are the fourth. Staining, split plastic caps, or screws that stand proud of an aluminium sheet are entries. They are often in a row, so the ceiling shows a row of small marks or one mark at the low end of that row, where the water finally concentrated.
The wall-to-roof joint is the fifth. If the stain is within a metre of an external wall, look at the flashing and the parapet before you buy a new field sheet. Coatings and tiles on a concrete deck are in this family. The entry can be a crack several metres from the drip, with water moving inside the screed. A sheet-roof method will not find it.
A careful test, and the tests to skip
If the roof is dry, the building is one storey, and you can reach an eave from a sound ladder with a second person footing it, you can sometimes watch a helper pour a bucket at one suspect at a time while you stay indoors. Start at the lowest suspect and move up. If you wet the ridge first, everything below gets wet and you have learned nothing.
Do not do this in rain, on a steep stone-coated slope, on a sheet you can see through, or on any roof where the ladder cannot stand on firm ground. Do not “test” with a pressure washer. You will drive water under laps that were not the leak and you may strip chips or coatings. A bucket is a test. A washer is an attack.
Do not spread sealant as your method of finding the hole. If the leak stops, you still do not know what you covered, and if it does not stop, you have made the real entry harder to see.
What to send so the quote is about your leak
Two or three photographs: the stain, the suspect outside, and a wider frame that shows storeys and access. A sentence on timing: during rain, after rain, first storm of the year, second peak, every rain, once. A sentence on history: new, patched with bitumen, patched with a different sheet, never touched. The neighbourhood, because a ground-floor stain in a low-lying Lagos street may be flood splash, while the same stain in a Gwarinpa duplex is almost certainly the roof.
Choose “leaking roof” on the form, or “not sure — need an inspection” if the suspects contradict each other. Micheletti Construction reads it. They cannot see through a photograph of a freshly painted ceiling. If you have painted, say so, and describe the stain that was there before the paint.
The rest of the path — confirming the entry and closing it — is the repair, priced after this description, not guessed from the size of the bucket.
Written for Roofing Nigeria, 6 November 2026. Figures are tied to the sources named in the text.