Professional Background, and how each claim is checked

Punch List is an independent guide to exterior work on homes being readied, inspected and sold. This page sets out what its judgements rest on.

What our judgements rest on

Our judgements rest on sources, not on jobs we have carried out. We start with the primary text: a state regulation, a town's own page, a manufacturer's installation manual or a university extension article. We check each claim against that wording and record where a source is dated or says it has no field data. When two sources disagree, we say so on the page rather than picking the figure that suits the point. Where a figure cannot be sourced, it is left out.

A worker in a hard hat and safety glasses measures a white wall with a tape measure — A stock photograph of a worker measuring a white wall with a tape measure, the kind of checking that comes before cladding goes on. The person pictured is not connected to this site.

Rules we hold to, each one checkable

No figure appears without its source named beside it. We keep a source's meaning intact when we put it in our own words, and we say when we have paraphrased. We do not rank companies or name one as the firm to hire, and we do not describe any job as our own. An old source is labelled as old. A reader who finds us breaking one of these rules should be able to point to the sentence and be right.

Two workers laying black membrane roofing around a vent box on a flat roof — A stock photograph of membrane work on a flat roof, around a vent box. The crew pictured is not connected to this site, and the picture stands for the flat-roof work the sources cover.

A belief worth setting down

A reader may arrive expecting that a heated gutter cable along the eave stops an ice dam. The belief is an understandable one, since the cable sits at the edge where the problem shows. The facts do not support it as a fix. A cable works on the symptom at the edge, while the dam is fed by heat leaving the house and melting snow that then refreezes at the cold eave.

An explainer on gutter costs before reading an estimate

A YouTube explainer on gutter costs and options for a home. It is a general overview rather than an interview, and nothing said in it is quoted on this page.

Three numbers about this guide and its subject

12: pages in this guide, counted from the site's own list of pages
3: things an ice dam needs at once: snow on the roof, heat to melt it and cold at the eave to refreeze the meltwater
24 in.: how far the eave ice barrier should reach inside the exterior wall line in the model residential code

12: a count of the pages on this site.

3: UMass Amherst, Preventing Ice Dams. The article is archived from 2011 and says some of its information may be outdated.

24 in.: Fine Homebuilding, Ice-Dam Protection: How Far Up the Roof Slope? This is the model code text (2018 IRC R905.1.2). The Massachusetts amendment could not be checked, so the figure is not a Massachusetts rule.