WOW $12,000 FOR A ROOF IS A LOT, HOW BIG IS YOUR HOUSE?
We are just a tad under 1,800 sq. ft. plus an attached 2 car garage plus a 10' x 20' covered patio.
The house/garage was a complete roof tear off as we already had 2 layers up there. The patio was in bad shape - tear off including the plywood. We have a hip roof with, I think, 5 valleys.
When hubby was in the hospital, in a coma, I was living at the hospital with him, we had a couple of really bad thunderstorms roll through and I went home for a couple of hours to check out the house. We had water in the basement. I cleared the floor drain, got the sump pump running (it, of course, had cocked sideways inside the crock) and pushed the water to where it would drain, all the time trying to figure out where the water had gotten in. The best I could figure was an area near our front sidewalk. After cleaning, quickly, as best I could in the basement, I went outside and shoveled dirt up against the house where I figured the water had entered. Then I went back to the hospital.
A couple of months later, hubby's home, living on what would be his first of two artificial hearts, batteries keeping him ticking, and again we had water in the basement. I was crushed! "What the hey is going on here?" While I was standing down there trying to figure out where the water was coming from I felt a drop of water land on my head - the rafter above me was wet. "Huh?" Okay, upstairs I go......
Do you know what I mean by the 'dead head space' above a stairwell? It's a dead space where the ceiling of the stairs runs down at the same angle as the stairs but there is no access to that area from the living space. Well, we do, kind of, have access to that area. We have an old style stereo system with old speakers built into a wall in our dining room which butts up to the basement stairwell. One of those speakers backs into this 'dead head space'. I pulled out the speaker (no mean feat here - they are meant to be floor models and are old and HEAVY) and there it was - a leak in the roof right above the stairwell in the dead head space. Talk about a sneaky spot for a leak! I crawled through the speaker hole, got inside the 'dead head space' and pulled the wet insulation out, I kept the speaker out and put a fan in the opening for about a week. One of these days I have to get back in there and re-install insulation. Ugh! I HATE working with insulation.
We had 3 companies give us estimates. Believe it or not they were all within $600 of each other.
We were (are) very pleased with the guys that did the work - they were neat; they cleaned up at the end of each day; they did the roof in sections; we weren't bare to the weather at any time & my BIL referred them to us.
While the roofers were here we had at least one day of 60 mph winds which was too much wind for them to work in. I snagged the two young guys to wheel 3 yds. of traffic bond back around the shed in the backyard for my wood stacking area. I think they said it was 60 contractor wheelbarrows.
They got a workout on a day the couldn't work due to wind and I gave them some greenbacks for the separate job. There was no way hubby nor I could have done that job.