Mountain Home Roofing on the Twin Lakes

The Farthest Town We Serve, and Why We Still Come

Mountain Home is not next door. From our Harrison office at 1410 Capps Rd, it is about an hour east on Highway 62 and Highway 5. That is a real drive, and we will not pretend otherwise. We come because Baxter County does not have enough permanent roofing contractors to serve the population, and the ones who show up after storms tend to disappear before the warranty matters.

American Exteriors has been in business since 1998, over 25 years. We are not based in Mountain Home, and we will not claim to be. We are based in Garfield and Harrison, and we drive to Mountain Home because we have customers here who need us to come back when something goes wrong. Every roof we install carries a transferable lifetime workmanship warranty. That warranty is only worth something if the company is still around to honor it. We are still around.

Mountain Home was originally called Rapp's Barren, then Talbert's Barren, "barren" being the old Ozark term for an open, grassy plateau. The town was incorporated on July 2, 1888, and became the seat of Baxter County in 1873, the year the county was created. The county was named for Elisha Baxter, who was governor of Arkansas at the time. This is a place with its own identity and its own weather patterns, separate from the NWA metro. It is not a suburb of anything. We treat it that way.

Ozark Winters on a Plateau

Mountain Home sits on the Ozark plateau at roughly 800 feet. It gets the full north Arkansas winter: ice, snow, freezing rain, and temperature swings that cycle above and below 32°F for weeks at a time. The January 2009 ice storm dropped one to two inches of ice accretion across this region. Roughly 300,000 residences lost power. Some were dark for nearly three weeks.

Ice accretion on a roof does two things. It adds weight, a uniform inch of ice across a 2,000-square-foot roof adds roughly 1,000 pounds. And it creates dams at the eaves. Heat escaping through the attic melts snow on the upper slope. The meltwater runs down to the cold eave overhang, refreezes, and builds a ridge. More water pools behind that ridge with nowhere to go and backs up under the shingles.

Every full replacement we do in the Mountain Home area includes ice-barrier underlayment along the eaves, in the valleys, and around penetrations. This is a self-sealing membrane, when a roofing nail passes through it, the membrane seals around the shank. Water cannot follow the nail hole into the decking. Arkansas code requires this underlayment where January mean temperatures drop below freezing, and Mountain Home qualifies. We also inspect the attic for insulation gaps and ventilation problems, because the ice dam cycle starts with heat loss through the ceiling.

Around the Twin Lakes

Downtown Mountain Home

The original town center around the Baxter County Courthouse. Mountain Home became the county seat in 1873, the same year the county was created. The oldest homes in this area date to the late 1800s, with hand-framed roofs and rough-sawn decking. The commercial buildings around the courthouse have flat and low-slope roofs that require different materials: modified bitumen or TPO instead of shingles. We handle both residential and commercial roofing.

Big Creek

The rural properties along Big Creek south of town. This is lowland terrain with heavy tree cover and persistent humidity. Moss and algae grow fast on north-facing roof slopes in this environment. We install algae-resistant shingles as our default product for creek-bottom properties. The copper granules in the shingle surface inhibit growth and keep the roof from developing black streaks within the first few years.

Norfork Lake Area

The lakefront and near-lake homes east and south of Mountain Home. Norfork Dam was the first of the two, completed in 1944, seven years before Bull Shoals. Homes along Norfork Lake range from 1950s fishing cabins to modern custom builds. The older cabins often have original roofs that have been patched and re-patched for decades. At some point, patching stops working and the whole roof needs to come off. The newer homes tend to have steeper pitches and more complex geometry, multiple ridgelines, dormers, covered porches, which means more flashing joints and more places for water to find a way in. We flash every transition with step flashing and counterflashing, not caulk.

College Hill

The residential area near Arkansas State University–Mountain Home. Housing stock here is a mix of rental properties and owner-occupied homes, mostly built from the 1970s through the 1990s. Rental properties tend to get deferred maintenance, the roof is the landlord's problem until it becomes the tenant's ceiling leak. We work with property owners and landlords to inspect and replace roofs before the damage spreads to the interior. A roof replacement is cheaper than a roof replacement plus drywall, insulation, and mold remediation.

Eastgate

The commercial and residential development along Highway 62 east of town, toward the lakes. This corridor has grown steadily as the Twin Lakes Area draws more retirees and tourism. Newer construction here generally has architectural shingles on engineered trusses, standard work that we do every day. The main concern on this side of town is wind exposure. The terrain opens up east of Mountain Home, and homes on the higher ground catch wind that the sheltered streets closer to the courthouse do not.

West Mountain Home

The neighborhoods west of Highway 5, stretching toward Gassville and Lakeview. Properties here sit on the plateau above the White River valley. The terrain drops off sharply to the south, and homes on the edge of that drop get wind from below, updrafts that hit the soffit and eave from underneath. This is the opposite of the typical wind pattern, and it catches roofers off guard if they are not familiar with plateau-edge construction. We secure the drip edge and starter strips on the windward eave with extra fasteners on these properties.