Put your roofing quotes side by side

Re-covering was normal here for decades, and a house can be carrying two or three generations of material — sometimes metal laid straight over shingle. Pulling two layers is far more labour and disposal than one, and a bid that assumes one on a house carrying two is a different bid wearing the same total.

Soft boards only show themselves once the roof is open. A stated rate and count turns the main unknown of the job into a bounded number instead of a surprise on day one.

Under metal especially, nobody sees this layer again once the panels go on. A word like felt or included is not a specification, and the difference shows up ten winters later.

Meltwater backing up under the covering is the local failure, and this membrane is the only thing that stops it. The useful question at the eave is how far past the wall line it runs, not whether it is there at all.

Reusing and re-sealing old metal is quicker on the day, and it is the usual reason a young roof starts staining a ceiling. On masonry, ask the follow-up: is the counterflashing let into the wall, or fastened to the face of it?

The cap you can see is not the seal; the shaped closures under it are. They cost very little, they take a few minutes to skip, and blown snow finds the gap they were meant to fill.

Metal sheds snow in a slab rather than gradually. Above a doorway, a walk or a lower roof it matters, and how they fasten matters too — clamped to a seam, or screwed through the panel.

Warm air reaching a cold deck is what puts ice at the eaves every February. Intake, exhaust and baffles are least costly to fix while the roof is off, and reinstalled as found means the question was skipped.

Included, billed separately, or left to the owner are three different deals. The permit also becomes the documentation the next owner of the house will wish existed.

A roof comes off in pieces and lands somewhere. On a narrow borough street that is a permit and a plan; on a farm property it is which gate the truck uses. Who pays for the container and how the ground is protected belong in the number.

The season here is finite and the autumn queue is real. How the crew closes the roof overnight, and what a delay does to the start window, are worth two sentences in writing.

The manufacturer covers the material and the contractor covers the workmanship, and on metal in particular nearly everything that goes wrong is workmanship. Who stands behind the labour, and for how long, is worth more than the brand name.