Residents in a Kanata neighborhood say shingles are flying off their new homes. They say complaints to their builder, Monarch, have fallen on deaf ears.  Now they are faced with leaky roofs or thousands of dollars in repairs.  Mark McAllister surveys the latest shingles to blow off his house during that wind storm last week.

“They were scattered all over the place,” he says, outside his house on Patriot Place in the Ottawa neighborhood of Kanata.

Fed up with repairing the roof on their 3 year old home and getting nowhere with their builder, Monarch, Mark and McAllister put up a sign earlier this week to complain. It read “My 3-year-old Monarch home needs a new roof!”

"Monarch told us it's not their problem anymore,” says McAllister, “that it's out of warranty, so they're washing their hands of it.”

The sign got them nowhere except into trouble when someone complained about it yesterday.

“The city came and said take it down or we’d be fined.”  Signs of that size are against a city bylaw.

Their neighbor has had problems with their shingles, too.  The rainstorm earlier this week ended up in their bedroom.

"I walked in my room,” says homeowner Kristin Cooper, as she points to the damage in her bedroom, “and there was water running down the wall into the electrical panel 

A quick glance down the street shows lifted shingles, broken shingles and missing shingles.  There is evidence in several yards where they've landed.

"I don't want to pay for it out of my pocket,” says Cooper, “I don't think that's fair. I live in a $350,000 home.”

The homeowners hired a roofer to take photos of the damage.  The roofer indicated in a letter that the shingles had not been properly installed and that there were indications that some had not even been nailed in at all.  The only fix, according to him, was to re-do the whole roof.

No one from Monarch was available to speak with CTV today but in an email to some of the residents, the builder indicated that the Tarion new home warranty had expired with respect to the roof on their houses; it was limited to one year.  “Therefore,” the email read, “no action will be taken by Monarch at this time.”

"It's almost unethical,” says Angela McAllister, “that they won't stand behind a warranty and they do something improperly and wait for the warranty to expire.”

The McAllisters still plan to fight, but with a forecast of rain, right now, they are going to pay for their own repairs.

“We have to protect our home and so we have no choice but to fix it,” says Mark McAllister.

Tarion's new home warranty allows coverage in that first year for defects in materials but the homeowners argue that if they can prove that those materials, in this case the shingles, were not installed properly in the first place, the warranty limitation shouldn't apply.