Choosing a Roofer

This is our old roof. It’s actually in pretty decent shape, however it looks pretty ugly with our freshly painted house. Plus it leaks in one spot over the garage, and I’m not positive I know where the leak is coming from, having tried to fix it once already unsuccessfully. We decided that since it would need to be replaced in the not to distant future, to have it replaced now. I toyed with the idea of recruiting a couple of friends and doing it ourselves, but then I did some calculations and figured out how much the two layers of old roof weighed (around 8,000lbs), and how much the new one would weigh (about 4,000lbs). I also realized how little I liked doing the same thing over and over and over again. Since that’s pretty much what roofing is, we decided it would be best to hire someone to do it.

Picking a contractor is never fun (at least not for me, maybe someone out there enjoys it, but I can’t imagine why). You get a half hour or so interview/estimate, a few references, and whatever else you can dig up. Then you give some guy a check for a 1/3rd the work (in this case about $2500) and hope he shows up to do it, and does a good job at that. I went to the Owens Corning, and GAF’s websites and they had a few recommended installers, and I figured choosing one of them would be a better idea than just randomly picking one out of the phone book (google really, because who uses a phone book anymore).

I called five roofers, one didn’t do roofs anymore, and one didn’t call me back, but I had the other three come out to give me estimates. One guy showed up while I wasn’t home and then called me back with the estimate, but the other two I met at the house. All three estimates came back in the same ballpark, and all seemed reputable so I basically just had to go on gut feel. I didn’t really like the idea of hiring someone I didn’t see in person, so that left it down to two, and we ended up going with Benchmark Construction, run by Tom and Katrina Kopciowski. They sent there estimate via e-mail which I liked, and he also got on the roof and actually looked around a bit instead of just doing everything from the ground.