If there’s one thing that everyone agrees to in Nova Scotia, it’s that building trades are a real mine field. Without question there are no end of people who will help you to fix something in your house, but there also seem to be an equal number who lack either the skills or the honesty to be trusted. And sometimes both.
Our roof is very old, and we had hoped to get it replaced before the winter snows set in. We knew it was old, but when you’re in the middle of buying a house you invariably manage to ignore some things that will later come to haunt you. I can do most home repairs, but roofs are one thing that I choose leave to skilled people who don’t mind falling 20+ feet to the ground.
Between other Life Events and some significant hurricane weather our roofing plans got delayed.
Still, we did approach about ten mostly local roofers to ask for a quote to do the roof. We learned a couple of things.
a) Roofing quotes around here can range from $8,000 to nearly $50,000.
b) Most of the local guys only want to do easy, simple, fast roofs. When you’ve got a 100+ year old house with multiple additions they tend to not want your business, which means that either:
no quote ever actually arrives
and if it does they can’t possibly fit you in until… oh … next summer. Or autumn.
Fine. It’s obvious that the small guys can’t help us, so we went looking at one of the big names, with a shiny website and mostly great on-line reviews. After looking at prices and meeting some mostly very nice sales reps we chose Company X.
The single biggest selling point for us was the promise, in writing, that the roof would be finished by mid-November, just before the big winter storms arrive. A ten man crew, we were told, could have it done in three days.
We signed, and got everything on paper and gave them a deposit to secure the deal.
The first week of November came and went. And the second, and the third. We rolled into December with a string of promises that the crew would arrive “next week” or even “end of this week.” Except that the weather was bad. Or someone was sick. Or half of their crews were heading back to Mexico for the winter. Or… well, we honestly stopped believing the promises.
Finally were told that the crew would be here two weeks before Christmas. On Thursday. Which turned into Friday, for a couple of hours, until they realised that they needed plywood to cover the roof structure. They took off to the lumber yard with a promise that they would return “tomorrow, at 6 am.”
At 6 am Saturday there were no roofers. Or at 7, or 8, or noon. Instead their truck sat parked outside of the Best Western hotel for the whole day, and we saw no-one on our roof. Since then we’ve been told variously that the guys were sick, or just needed a day off.
Finally at about 6:30 am Sunday the guys - five of them, not the ten promised - returned. They proceeded to work a 15 hour day with no breaks except when I drove into town and bought them McDonalds and Tim Hortons’ coffees. Triple Triple.
(By way of background, in Nova Scotia it is perfectly legal to ask people to work a 15 hour day with no breaks, and whats more to not pay any overtime.)
By early evening it was obvious that there was no way the section of roof that had been stripped would be finished, even if they promised to work “all night, with lights on our heads.” The decision was made to instead tarp the roof to keep it dry.
That was because the following day we expected hurricane force winds and pelting rain. Which was in fact what happened.
Of course the crew didn’t have any tarps with them, and the local Home Hardware was closed on Sunday, so we wound up with a roof covered in roofing membrane (what would go under the shingles, like Tyvek on the sides of a new house) held down with staples and with scrap lumber from beside our barn.
It survived the storm. Just. Unlike the roofing company who were fired.
You see, at 10 pm Sunday night, after sort of covering our roof, the crew were driving away to a job in Prince Edward Island. On a good day that’s a five hour drive.
Monday and Tuesday at least would be really bad weather. The crew told us that they were leaving for Ontario, for Christmas, on Thursday the 23rd. Their boss told us they were leaving on Friday the 24th. No matter how we looked at it there was no possible way we would have a new roof before the end of the first week of January.
One of the surprises with our roof was that under the asphalt shingles, where you would expect either an older layer of shingles, or maybe tar paper, they found cedar shakes. Shakes with enough nails to survive the hurricane force winds around here.
The labour to strip all of this was looking massive, and the firm quote for the roofing job suddenly jumped by a significant margin. Yes, it was the classic “stop in the middle of the job and jack up the price since the homeowner can’t possibly just stop in mid-stream.”
Except that we did. The crew (from Ontario) swung back to grab their tools. Someone else came by to collect the materials.
The actual straw that broke the camel’s back was a bin full of roofing waste.
With 100+ kmh winds projected to hit, we had visions of this debris being picked up and dropped on top of our neighbours, or worse, through our own windows. Despite promises, this bin sat wide open, uncovered, through the storm, and for a day after.
And we were faced with finding a solution when corners of the roofing membrane started to lift after the next storm.
As is often the case in Liverpool, Facebook came to our rescue, and for a very reasonable $800+ our roof was now covered with good, tough, and well anchored tarps.
And we have a new roofer lined up. We actually really loved the specific roofing material they use, but we had rejected them because their price was quite a bit more than the cost of asphalt shingles. Between the jump in asphalt prices and the pending winter storm season, we signed with them because they assured us that they could get the work done in January.
Except…. the guy coordinating the work is now down with a nasty case of shingles.
And yes, the dark humour of that is not lost on us.