OUR STORY
Founded by a framer who kept getting the leak calls
Ellis Brandt did not come up through roofing. He grew up in Hutchinson, moved to Wichita in his twenties, and spent fourteen years framing houses for builders across the Wichita area. Framing is the trade that builds the roof's skeleton: the trusses, the decking, the valleys, the exact lines that sheet metal and shingles later have to follow. Ellis walked bare decks in subdivisions out toward Maize and Goddard, on west-side growth streets, and on infill lots in the old neighborhoods where a new wall has to meet a hundred-year-old one.
Years after those houses were finished, the calls started coming back to him. A homeowner with a stain would ring the builder, the builder would ring Ellis, because the framer remembers where the valley runs and what the decking looked like before it disappeared under felt and shingles. What he found, over and over, was that the visible problem was the smallest part of the story. The shingles looked tired but serviceable; the decking at the valley was soft. The drip was in the hall; the cracked vent boot was above the bathroom. He was reading roofs correctly from a trade that was not supposed to be his anymore.
In 2020 he made it his trade. Chisholm Roofing Co started in a rented bay off Kellogg with Ellis, a truck, and a habit he has kept: every inspection is read on the roof, up close, because a person deciding about a roof they cannot climb deserves better than a guess from the street. Nolan Pierce, who framed beside him for six years, crossed over in 2021 and runs most of the repair work. Tess Whitaker, who once scheduled Ellis's framing crews for a builder, keeps the office and the storm week lists. Three people, one city and its towns, no call center.
The name is the trail's. Wichita began as a trading post on the Chisholm Trail, where Jesse Chisholm ran goods south from the rivers' meeting place, and the town became the trail's railhead in 1872. A working road, judged by whether it got the herd home. Ellis thought a roofing company could stand to be judged the same plain way.
What we run on
Layers, not surfaces
A roof fails underneath before it fails on top. Decking, underlayment, flashing, and covering each have a job, and a repair that ignores the layer where the water actually travels is paint over a leak. We read the stack, layer by layer, and the reading is the diagnosis.
The roof is the report
No diagnosis here is a guess from the ground. It is a close reading: the boot, the bruise, the flashing line, the valley, each with a plain sentence about what it means. A roof read up close changes decisions, and that reading happens before any decision is asked for.
Repair is a respectable answer
A sound roof with one failed area deserves a repair, full stop. Replacement is for roofs whose covering is worn on every slope or whose decking has gone soft across the field, and when that is the honest picture, the reading will say so and the planning numbers come out at your pace. Nobody here needs your roof to be a bigger job than it is.
Local means the storm map too
Wichita roofing is weather work. The crew keeps its map small enough to know which neighborhoods a given hail cell crossed, which subdivisions were roofed in which years, and which streets always call after a west wind. That knowledge is not a slogan. It is what makes an inspection fast and a diagnosis specific.
Start the conversation the way every job here starts, with a free inspection: free, hassle-free, and no-obligation.