Roofing contractors in Maryland and Virginia

Between the bay and the mountains the houses run from colonial brick to last decade's subdivision. A quote written for one of them rarely fits the other, and the gap is never really about the shingle.

Before you compare two prices

Ask about the flashing first. Whether it gets replaced, or peeled back, sealed and laid down again, is the line that decides whether you are calling someone about the same corner next spring. It is also the line that is almost never spelled out.

Then the decking, for a different reason: nobody can see it until the old covering is off. An honest quote says what a sheet costs and how many it assumes. One that stays quiet has not given you a lower price, only moved the number to a morning when the roof is already open and you have no room to argue.

Three more worth asking, quickly:

Does the ice-and-water shield reach the eaves and the valleys, or only where the code makes someone put it?
Is the ventilation being corrected, or put back the way it was?
Who covers the labor if something fails, and for how long?

That last one catches people. The manufacturer stands behind the material, and material rarely fails on its own. What you are actually buying is the workmanship, and that is the half a thin quote tends to leave vague.

One more thing worth saying plainly: this is not one market. The Washington and Baltimore suburbs behave one way, and the Virginia markets that sit apart from both behave another. Richmond and Fredericksburg carry older housing and steeper original slopes than the postwar belt does, while on the coast at Virginia Beach and Chesapeake the salt in the air and the damp that comes with it do work the inland freeze-and-thaw never gets to. A quote written for one of those is not a quote for the other.

Roofs rarely give out in the open. They give out at the seams. Six of them, numbered. Five are places where the roof meets something else.

Tap to enlarge

1 Ridge caps. Thin, fully exposed, and the first course to lift.
2 The field. Granule loss is the honest measure of how much life is left.
3 Valleys. One channel taking the runoff of two slopes, all year round.
4 Flashing. At the chimney, and where the garage roof meets the wall of the house.
5 The vent boot. Small, rubber, and on a much shorter clock than everything around it.
6 Eaves. Where water that has backed up at the edge gets under the courses.

The work

Why roofs fail in this region

Loudoun, Prince William and western Maryland built out in waves, so whole streets reach the end of a first roof within a season or two of each other. Winters produce ice damming at the eaves. Add seventy-year-old tree canopy over the postwar suburbs, and most of what gets reported here is predictable.