Roofing Guides

Written to be useful whether or not you ever call us. Every figure in them is sourced on the cost page.

Ice Dams: The Honest Version

The mechanism explained properly, why no roofing material addresses it, what actually does, and in what order. This one probably costs us work, and it is the most useful thing on the site.

Standing Seam vs Screw-Down

Concealed clips against exposed fasteners. Why one costs double, why thermal movement decides it, and why the honest answer on a rural property is frequently both.

What Snow Does on Metal

Why it slides, what shedding does for load and ice, and the catch — a roof's worth of snow releasing at once, and where snow guards therefore belong.

Reading a Roofing Quote

The eight lines a complete quote contains, the four tells worth questioning, and the sequence that saves money. Start by asking how they measured it.

Metal Over Existing Shingles?

Usually possible, occasionally sensible, rarely what we recommend here. The four questions that decide it, and what a defensible version actually specifies.

Colour, Finish & Profile

Profile matters more than colour. Why metal is historically correct on a New England house, what reads well from the water, and the coating question nobody asks.

Three tools sit alongside these. The cost calculator converts footprint to real roof area and prices it. The fifty-year comparison runs metal against asphalt on your own roof and shows its assumptions. The ice dam check tells you whether you have a roofing problem at all.

Get a Roof Quote

Tell us the roof shape as well as the size — complexity drives a metal price far more than square footage does. And if ice dams are what brought you here, say so: the answer may be insulation rather than roofing, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a roof that does not fix it.

We reply to every request within 1 business day.

  • Every cost figure we publish is sourced and dated
  • We tell you when the answer is insulation, not a new roof
  • We quote the roof, not the footprint — complexity is priced openly
  • Deck repair rate agreed before tear-off, not discovered during it
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