Every Front Range homeowner knows the sound. The sky goes green-grey, the first ice taps the window like a thrown pebble, and for the next ten minutes your house takes a beating you can only listen to.
Hail season in Colorado is as predictable as ski season. What's not predictable is which storm cell picks your street. You can't steer the storm — but you can decide, months ahead of it, how much of it your home shrugs off. Here's the pre-season walkthrough we'd do on our own homes.
Start at the gutters — they keep the receipts
Gutters are your exterior's honesty policy. Walk the house and look up: dents and dimples along the gutter face are the record of the last storm you may not have noticed. Then look down — mulch washed out below the eaves, soil trenched at the foundation, stains streaking the siding. Those are signs the drainage half of your defense is already losing, and a hail-heavy downpour will only press the advantage.
While you're there, clear the runs and check the downspouts throw water well away from the foundation. A gutter that overflows in a summer hailstorm delivers ice and water straight to the one place you never want it: behind the walls.
Read your siding like an adjuster will
Siding damage hides in plain sight. Walk each elevation in raking morning or evening light and look for chips, crescent-shaped cracks, and faces that look bruised rather than broken. Older or brittle materials don't announce failure — they let water start working quietly behind the wall, and freeze-thaw finishes the job over winter.
If your siding is due for replacement anyway, hail country changes the math. Class 4 is the highest impact rating siding can carry, and it's the difference between filing a claim every few seasons and hosing the ice off your walls in June. It's the single biggest pre-season upgrade a Colorado exterior can make.
Free consultation, samples on the table, zero pressure.
Windows: the seal matters more than the glass
Everyone checks for cracked panes. Fewer people check what hail actually kills: the seals. A window that took an impact two seasons ago may still look fine and already be fogging between panes on cold mornings — that's a failed seal, and it means the insulating layer is gone even though the glass is technically intact.
Run a hand around interior frames on a windy day, look for fogging you can't wipe away, and note any sash that's suddenly stiff. If replacements are on the horizon, impact-resistant glass packages exist for exactly one reason, and you live in the state that invented the reason.
Document your "before" while the sky is blue
The cheapest insurance move you'll ever make is free: photograph your exterior now, in good light, elevation by elevation, with your phone's date stamp doing the work. If a storm hits, you'll have a clean before/after record instead of a memory and an argument.
Better yet, let a professional build the record. Our free Home Exterior Assessment walks every elevation — glass, frames, siding, trim, gutters — and documents it all in photos you keep, whether or not you ever hire us. If the house is ready, you'll hear exactly that.
If the storm wins anyway: have this ready
Sometimes the sky simply deals a bigger hand. If a storm gets through, the first seventy-two hours are about order, not speed. Photograph everything before touching anything — wide shots of each elevation first, then close-ups of individual damage, with the date stamp on. Don't sign anything on your doorstep: hail brings out storm-chasing crews from three states away, and the pressure to "sign today so we can get you on the schedule" is precisely the sales tactic a legitimate contractor doesn't need. Get your documentation, call your insurer on your own timeline, and choose a company with a local address you can drive to and a warranty that will still mean something in five years.
And if you're staring at dented gutters right now instead of reading ahead of the season — that's what our Hail & Storm Response page is for. Same free assessment, same documentation, no pressure either way.
The bottom line
Hail season rewards the homeowner who prepared in May and punishes the one who Googled contractors in July. A one-hour walkthrough, a photo record, and an honest look at your siding and seals is most of the battle — and if the storm finds you anyway, you'll meet it with documentation in hand and a first line of defense that was built for it.