LESLIE: Mary in Delaware finds The Money Pit on WDEL. And you’re thinking about replacing your roof. Tell us about it.
MARY: I’m a little bit leery on … how do you go about finding a good roofer?
TOM: Well, finding a good contractor is not as impossible as it might seem. The first thing that you want to do, Mary, is identify what kind of roof you want to put on; whether that’s an asphalt roof or a metal roof. Try to develop that specification so you know what kind of roof that you want. Then once you know that, then you’re going to want to interview probably two to three to four different contractors and ask them for prices and their recommendations on the kind of roof process that you want to undergo.
The reason that you’re making these decisions ahead of time is, otherwise, you’re not going to be in a position to compare apples to apples. One guy’s going to recommend to go with one way; another guy’s going to recommend to go a different way. It’s better off to have those decisions done ahead of time. If you need a specification prepared, it’s not something you can do yourself. You could hire a professional home inspector or an architect to do that for you for a small fee.
Once you identify the roofers, then it’s best to get, from each roofer, a list of their references. And then actually physically call those references. In the roofing business, the other thing that’s nice is if you have the address of the property, you can drive by …
LESLIE: Mm-hmm.
TOM: … and see what the work looks like. But there’s nothing that replaces that level of leg work when you’re trying to find a contractor (inaudible).
LESLIE: Yeah. And the type of questions to ask the references that you’re going to call are: did they do the job on time; did they come in at the same amount of money that they estimated at the end of the project; how much longer did it take than they said it was going to take. Just go through the whole process of the … of the new roof installation itself and find out how they did overall and would these folks use them again or recommend them; that’s the biggest word there.
TOM: And if you do that, Mary, I’m sure you’re going to come up with a good roofer and a good roofing job.
Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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