The Roofing Company Wood Wind Homeowners Call First

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Recent Wood Wind Roofing Projects

5 before-and-after projects documented for the homeowner and the homeowners insurance carrier.

Before You Sign and While the Wood Wind Job Runs

The questions split neatly into two groups, and mixing them up is how people end up frustrated. Before you sign, the questions are about scope and accountability.

What exactly is coming off, what is going back on, who is doing it, what happens when the wood is worse than expected, and what the workmanship coverage says in writing. Those all have to be settled while you still have the option of hiring somebody else, because afterward they become requests rather than terms.

Once the job is scheduled, the questions become logistical, and they're worth asking a few days out. What time does the crew arrive and how many days is this expected to take. Where should the dumpster sit and where do you need cars moved from.

Will the material be delivered ahead of time and is it going on the roof or in the driveway. Does anybody need to be home, and how does the crew get to the attic if there's work to do inside.

During the job, the useful questions are short and specific. At the end of the first day, once the tear-off is done, ask what the deck looked like and ask to see the photographs while the roof is still open.

That's the moment when everything hidden becomes visible, and it's the last chance to see it for another few decades. If anything is being added to the price, that is when you should be hearing about it, well before the last day.

After the last shingle goes on, there are only a couple left. Walk the property with the lead, look at the flashing details up close where you can reach them, and get the final paperwork including the workmanship terms and whatever registration the material coverage requires.

Ask when the town inspector is coming if a permit was pulled. Then keep the folder somewhere you will find it, because the next person to need it might be a buyer's inspector some years from now.

Freeze, Thaw and What It Costs You

The single hardest thing on a roof in this part of the state isn't the coldest night of the year or the hottest afternoon. It's the number of times the temperature crosses back and forth over freezing, which around here happens constantly from late fall through early spring.

Water gets into a small gap during the warm part of the day, expands when it locks up overnight, and makes the gap slightly bigger. Repeat that dozens of times a winter, over many winters, and small becomes structural.

You see the result in specific places. Nail heads that have worked their way up a fraction at a time until they push against the shingle above. Sealant joints around a chimney that were tight when they were installed and now show hairline cracks running the length of the bead.

Mortar in the chimney crown itself, which soaks up water and comes apart in flakes. The exposed edge of plank decking at the eaves, which swells and shrinks until the fasteners no longer have anything solid to hold.

Material matters here too. An older shingle that has lost most of its granules absorbs and releases moisture much more readily than a new one, so the freeze and thaw cycle accelerates its decline. That's why roofs in this region often look fine for many years and then seem to fall apart in the space of two or three seasons.

Nothing sudden happened. The material simply crossed the point where it stopped shedding water quickly, and the winters did the rest.

The practical response isn't complicated. Keep water moving off the roof and out of the gutters so it has less opportunity to sit and freeze, keep the attic cold and dry so the roof deck stays the same temperature as the air outside, and deal with cracked sealant and lifted fasteners while they are still small enough to be repairs. None of it is glamorous work, and all of it buys years.

Taking Your Time After the Inspection

When the visit ends you should be under no more obligation than you were before we pulled up. That isn't a courtesy line. It's the only sensible way to sell a roof, because a homeowner who felt pushed spends the whole job waiting to be taken advantage of, and that's a miserable few days for everybody involved.

So the estimate goes to you with a date on it and a plain note about what could move the pricing, usually material cost changes rather than anything to do with you. Take it to whoever you talk to about money.

Sleep on it through a couple of weekends if that's what you need. We follow up once, maybe twice, and then we leave it alone until you get in touch.

We expect you to get other bids, and we would rather you did. What we ask is that you compare them on the same terms. Look at whether each one states the layers coming off, whether there's a decking allowance with a rate attached, whether flashing is itemized by location or hidden in a lump, and whether the ventilation plan is written down.

A bid that leaves all of that blank usually isn't the cheaper one at all. It has simply moved the decisions to a day when the roof is already open and you have very little room to argue about anything.

If you want help reading somebody else's proposal, bring it to us and we'll go through it with you honestly, including the parts where their approach is defensible or plainly better than ours. We have pointed homeowners toward another company more than once when the fit was clearly better, and we have never regretted it. A roof stays on a house for a long time, and choosing who builds it is worth a couple of weeks of ordinary thinking instead of one evening under pressure.

Call with as many questions as you want while you work through it. Nobody here keeps score of how long a homeowner takes to decide.

Measuring a Wood Wind Roof Before Pricing It

Pricing starts with area, and area on a roof is not the same as the footprint of the house. A steep roof covers considerably more surface than a shallow one over the same rooms, which is why two houses with identical square footage inside can need very different amounts of material. So the first thing that happens is a real measurement, plane by plane, either walked with a tape and a wheel or pulled from aerial imagery and then verified on site.

Pitch gets recorded for every slope, and it does two jobs in the estimate. It sets the area, and it sets the labor. A crew can move comfortably on a moderate pitch and work most of the day.

Past a certain steepness they need staging, roof jacks and harness anchors, everything gets carried up by hand instead of slid, and the same square of shingles takes considerably longer to install. That's not padding. It's the honest cost of working on a surface people cannot stand on.

Waste is the part homeowners rarely hear about. A simple gable roof wastes very little, because most bundles get installed whole.

A roof with several valleys, dormers and hips wastes a good deal more, since every shingle running into a valley or up a hip gets cut and the offcut usually goes in the dumpster. A fair estimate states the waste factor openly, and a cut-up roof will always carry a higher one.

The measurement also produces the counts everything else hangs on. Linear feet of eave and rake for the starter and the drip edge, linear feet of ridge and hip for the caps, linear feet of valley for the membrane, the number of penetrations needing new collars, and the length of every wall the roof runs into.

When those numbers appear on your estimate, you can check them against your own house. When they don't appear at all, you are being asked to trust a number nobody has shown their work for.

Why Wood Wind Streets Age Out Together

Neighborhoods here tend to have gone up in a run, a few dozen houses across a couple of building seasons with the same crews and the same materials. That means the roofs on a street generally reach the end of their useful life inside the same window. It's why one house wrapped in ladders often turns into half a block over the following summers, and why what your neighbor was quoted can serve as a rough sanity check on your own numbers.

The pattern only carries so far. Two houses framed in the same week can be in very different shape depending on what surrounds them.

A roof shaded by mature trees stays cooler and holds up longer on the sun side, though it picks up moss and packed debris in the valleys instead. A house on the open edge of a subdivision, with nothing between it and the fields, takes wind that its interior neighbors never feel, and the losses show along the rakes and the ridge first.

Orientation does the rest of the work. The slope facing the afternoon sun in this part of the state takes far more heat and light than the shaded side of the very same house, and it's common to find one plane worn through while the other still has some life left in it.

We'll tell you when that is the case. Sometimes replacing the whole roof is still the right call, for the sake of matching and of the flashing that has to come out regardless, and sometimes it plainly is not.

What we will not do is price your house off a template because we worked three doors down last spring. Every home gets its own measurement, its own look in the attic, and its own set of photographs.

The neighborhood tells us where to start looking, and that is all it tells us. The rest has to come off your roof.

Our Work in Wood Wind Neighborhoods

We've roofed homes throughout Wood Wind and the surrounding communities. Select any neighborhood to read what working there has taught us.

Where we respond near Wood Wind

Indiana-licensed crews dispatched to Wood Wind and the closest surrounding communities.