What is the Difference Between a Re-roof and a Re-cover?
Can’t I Just Re-Cover my Roof?
A lot of people want to do a recover. Because it can save a thousand bucks, lots of homeowners go with the cheapest bid. And I understand where they are coming from. A thousand dollar difference between bids is a lot of money, but it’s a small sum in the long run. We just want to be able to sleep at night knowing that we did do someone a favor with their roof. A re-roof is how people used to do roof repairs 40 years ago. You’d just put new shingles on top of the old shingles. But housing codes have changed through the years to protect people from too many layers of shingles, and for good reason.
As a roofing company that wants to give the highest-quality roof to every customer, we only do tear offs, e.g. new roofs, because of the problems with re-covers. In far too many cases, people come back years later because they’ve got a drift between their gutter and we’ve had to come out and try to fix the original roofers troublesome workmanship. And that’s really where the issue is.
So, if the shingles on top off the roof need replacing, odds are the original underlayment should be replaced, too, and you don’t do that with a re-roof. You just nail some tiles over the top and hope it makes your leak go away for a few years. It’s really a temporary measure. And it may cause problems when you try and sell your home.
In a reroof, the old roof is now part of the new roof. And so, I’m warranting a roof where someone else did the old roof and now we just slap some shingles some over the top of the old roof. But there are problems with that method, which is why we don’t do it.
We don’t know what kind of wall flashes they have. We don’t know what kind of underlayment they have. We don’t know what the ice and water shield is installed to code. We don’t even know if they have ice and water shield because we’ve never seen anything underneath the shingles.
The bottom line: If your shingles are worn and deteriorated to the point that you need new shingles on top of the existing, original roof, tearing off the old roof and installing a new roofing system with a proper construction technique is the only proper way to do it.