What a roofing proposal has to say

A price on its own carries no information. A roof is fifteen or twenty separate decisions and a number at the bottom of a page hides every one of them. If you are holding two proposals for the same house and one is markedly cheaper, the useful question is never whether it is too good to be true. It is which of the six items below it does differently.

The six that move the number

1. Tear off or layover. Stripping to the deck costs labour and skip capacity. Laying a second layer over the first saves both and buys trouble: the new shingle takes the shape of the old one, the deck cannot be inspected, and the assembly runs hotter. A proposal should say which, in words.
2. Decking allowance. Nobody knows what is under the shingles until the shingles are off. A proposal should state how many sheets or boards are included, and the per unit price for anything beyond that. A proposal that is silent on decking is a proposal with an open ended item in it.
3. Ventilation. Intake at the eave and exhaust at the ridge, balanced. Ridge vent, box vents, or a combination, and how much of it. Adding exhaust without intake makes the attic pull air from the house, which is worse than doing nothing.
4. Underlayment and ice barrier. Synthetic underlayment over the field is now standard. Self adhering ice and water membrane at the eaves and in the valleys is what a freeze and thaw climate needs. How far up the slope it runs is a real specification and should be written.
5. Flashing. Step flashing at walls, counter flashing at chimneys, pipe and flue collars, valley treatment. The cheap version is reusing the old metal. It is not always wrong and it is always worth knowing.
6. Drip edge, starter course and cap. Metal at eaves and rakes, a purpose made starter strip rather than cut up shingles at the bottom course, and hip and ridge cap that matches the field. Individually small, collectively the difference between a roof that seals its edges and one that lifts.

The four sentences to look for in the paperwork

• What triggers the contract. Some documents become binding on your signature. Some become binding when an insurer approves an amount. Those are very different things and both are legal. Find out which one you are holding.
• What the payment schedule is. A deposit and a balance on completion is ordinary. Full payment before material is delivered is not.
• What happens to the property. Skip placement, driveway protection, landscaping, and a magnet sweep for nails at the end. The last one is the one homeowners remember for years.
• What happens if the decking is worse than expected. See item two above. This should already be answered by a number, not by a conversation on the day.

What to do with an insurance driven job

If the work is going through a claim, the mechanics change but the document does not. You still want a scope with the six items above written out, because the scope is what makes your contractor's description of the roof and your insurer's description of the roof comparable line by line.

Missouri law is specific about the boundary here: a roofing contractor may not represent or negotiate on your insurance claim, so nobody should be offering to. What a contractor does is measure the roof, photograph the damage, produce a written scope, and be present on site as the contractor when the adjuster inspects. The conversation with the insurer stays yours. Any company selling you the opposite is selling something the statute does not permit it to perform.

A note on price ranges

We are not printing a price per square on this page. Pitch, storeys, access, layers, decking condition, waste factor, penetrations and material choice move the number so far that a range wide enough to be honest would be useless, and a range narrow enough to be useful would be dishonest. Get two or three written scopes on your actual roof and compare them item by item. That is the only price research that means anything.