Free Roofing Estimates: You Get What You Pay For

January 25th, 2009 — Consumer Roof Info

One of the first things a perspective residential customer usually asks a roofing contractor is, “Do you give free estimates?” This seems like an easy question but ends up being more complex than you might think.

A roof estimate can be as basic as quoting a price range per square foot or hourly rate to do replacement or repairs. This “ballpark” approach doesn’t require much time or effort and is easy to offer for free.

Affordable Roofing has found that solving a customers problems is usually not that simple. There are many building styles and even more types of roofing systems. We have learned that each roof that we encounter has it’s own unique “personality”. To truly solve a roofing problem, the roofing professional needs to get “personal” with the roof.

We begin by doing an inside inspection of the home. Leak areas are examined and we perform an attic inspection. This is a critical part of the roof analysis. The attic inspection will enable us to check several conditions that give us insight into the roofs performance.

Visual inspection of the roof deck can reveal stained or damaged decking, rusty nails or mold growth. The amount and condition of the attic insulation will be checked.

One of the most important items that is examined is attic ventilation. We have found a surprising number of homes that have improperly ventilated attics. Inadequate or unbalanced ventilation is a major cause of premature roof failures.

Once the inside work is done we turn to the roof itself. Measurements and pictures of the roof are taken. We inspect the general condition of the roofing and do core samples. Unusual or suspect details are examined.

If we are searching for a specific leak or leaks, all aspects of the roof system in the leak area(s) are carefully scrutinized to determine the source of the problem. This process can take from a few minutes to several hours depending on the complexity of the roof and number of leaks.

We finish our job analysis with a walk around the home to determine the best set up area from which to run the job. This entails checking landscape details, truck and material delivery access to the home and impact on the homeowners daily activities.

The final phase is to correlate all the information we have gathered and assemble a comprehensive evaluation including Affordable Roofing’s recommendations.

There reaches a point where time, effort and knowledge invested on a perspective roof project changes the exercise from an estimate to a chargeable evaluation. Free roof estimate – the sad truth is that a free estimate is worth what you pay for it.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Consumer Roof Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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1 Comment so far

  1. Olympia's Roofing Specialist on March 2, 2009 2:11 pm

    Great article, thanks for such an insightful post.

    I personally would ask around friends, neighbors, Etc. do some research on line about how to hire a good contractor, ask the roofing supply companies for referrals they wont give out a name of a company that owes them a lot of money and trust your gut, when you get that first impression your probably on the right track.

    These are all the things that are on my proposals. I wish all customers read this before choosing a roofing contractor.

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