Roof Replacement & Full Tear-Off

A recover lays a new covering over the one that is already there. It skips the tear-off, the dumpster and a day of labour, and on paper it looks like the same roof for less work. What it actually skips is the only opportunity anyone gets to look at the decking, which means the new roof is installed over an assumption.

Layer count settles it before preference does. Jurisdictions limit how many roof coverings a structure may carry, and a roof already holding two is not a candidate regardless of how sound it is. Even where a recover is allowed, the second layer adds weight, holds heat against the new shingles, and forces every fastener to find the deck through twice the material. The next replacement then starts as a two-layer tear-off, which is slower and produces more debris than the one that was avoided.

None of that makes a recover wrong in every case. A single sound layer on a simple roof, over decking that has been genuinely verified rather than assumed, is a defensible piece of building. The mistake is choosing a recover to avoid finding out what the deck is doing. That information does not stop being true because nobody looked at it.

Most of a roof can be read before the job starts. The covering is visible, the pitch and the planes can be measured off a ladder, and the exposed leg of every flashing can be looked at. Two things cannot be seen at all. One is the decking. The other is the part of a step flashing that sits behind the siding, which is why sealant smeared across an exposed leg tells you almost nothing about the lap underneath it. The deck is the larger of the two unknowns, because it is the surface everything else is fastened to. An attic inspection narrows the range, since staining, daylight at a penetration and sheathing that flexes underfoot all tell you something, but it narrows it rather than settles it. Insulation, ductwork and finished ceilings hide most of the underside of a typical roof.

What turns up after a tear-off is usually local rather than general. Rot concentrates where water has been getting in for a while, so it clusters around plumbing boots, in valleys, along the eave and at the chimney. Older homes with plank decking bring a second question, since board spacing and split boards both affect whether a modern covering can be fastened to it properly. Panel decking fails differently. Plywood separates at the plies, and OSB swells at the panel edges and never comes back down once it dries, and in both cases sheathing that no longer holds a nail has to come out whether it looks bad or not.

This is why the decking language in a proposal matters more than almost anything else in it. The proposal should say what it assumes about the deck, state a unit rate for replacing sheathing if the assumption is wrong, name who makes that call on site, and commit to photographs of anything replaced before new material covers it. A proposal that is silent on decking is not a cheaper job. It is the same job with the conversation postponed to the worst possible moment, which is the middle of a tear-off with the house open.

Roofing is permitted and inspected locally, and the two states JKey holds licenses in write the rules differently. Georgia work runs on the state minimum standard codes, enforced locally, and in Walton County a replacement is a permitted job with inspections attached. A house inside Monroe city limits is permitted by the city rather than the county, which is the ordinary arrangement anywhere a building sits inside an incorporated municipality. Florida adds requirements that simply do not attach in Georgia, and they change the scope rather than the paperwork.

Three of those differences show up on nearly every Florida replacement, and only two of them happen on the roof. The fastening of the deck has to be brought up to the current schedule once the old covering is off, which is real work on a house built to an older standard. A secondary water barrier goes over the deck, so that the roof still resists water if the covering above it is lost in a storm. The third is settled before anyone climbs a ladder, because the assembly has to carry a product approval for the wind zone the building sits in, and that constrains what can be specified long before anyone gets to preferences.

The practical effect is that a Florida replacement front-loads more work into the stage between tear-off and covering. In Gainesville the dry-in is an inspected condition the roof has to pass before shingles go on. That is worth knowing when two proposals from two states appear to describe the same job at different scopes. They are not describing the same job. The code, not the contractor, is what put the extra items in one of them.