Compare roofing quotes by the lines they leave out

A rowhouse or a twin may carry shingle over the original slate, or two courses of shingle over each other, and every layer is weight the roof was never designed for. Pulling two is close to twice the labor and twice the dumpster of pulling one. A quote priced for a single layer on a roof that has more is a quote that will grow.

Under old slate the deck is board, laid with gaps, and often soft along the eaves and at the party wall where water has been finding its way for decades. Nobody sees it until the slate is off. A price per sheet and an assumed count turns that into a bounded figure; leaving it out turns it into a call on day one.

Felt and synthetic are different products at different prices, and only one of them tolerates being left open through a week of wet weather. A quote that says "underlayment" without a product name has not told you which you are getting.

Winters here freeze and thaw repeatedly rather than staying frozen, and a porch roof pitched too shallow for shingle holds water at every cycle. Whether the membrane covers the eaves only, the valleys, the low-slope porch, or everything is a different quantity and a different price, and the porch is the line most often missed.

At the party wall the flashing belongs to both houses and neither, and re-sealing what is there is faster than rebuilding it. It is also the commonest reason a roof installed a few years ago is staining the ceiling on the shared side.

A brick chimney on a rowhouse often sits on the party wall and serves nothing any more. Counterflashing cut into the mortar, a sound crown, and a decision about whether it stays are separate work, and they are regularly absent from a headline number.

A rowhouse attic vents through the front and back only, if it vents at all, and reinstalling what was there does nothing about it. Adding intake and exhaust where a shared wall blocks the usual paths is real work, and the quote should say whether it is doing that or putting things back as found.

The metal at the eave and the starter course under the first row are where a shallow porch roof lets go first. Both are cheap, both are easy to leave off a quote, and both are where the trouble begins when they are missing.

Built-in box gutters on the older twins are specialist work some crews decline. Hung gutters on a rowhouse drain into a shared downspout that belongs to a neighbor. Whether they come down and go back, get replaced, or get worked around should be a written line, not an assumption.

Every borough and township on either side of the river runs its own building department with its own fee and inspection. Whether the contractor pulls the permit, bills it separately, or leaves it to you are three different arrangements.

The manufacturer stands behind the shingle. Somebody has to stand behind the installation, and on a roof full of shared joints it is the installation that decides. A material warranty with no written labor warranty covers the part that rarely fails.

A dumpster on a street with no driveway, old slate coming down past the neighbor's windows, a magnet sweep of a sidewalk everyone on the block uses. These are the lines that generate complaints afterward, and a quote that addresses them has stood on the street and looked.