subject: Managing Your Roofing Project [print this page] Mario Williams is a partner at Lone Star Roofing, a third-generation family owned and operated roofing contractor located in Texas. A graduate from the University of Texas, Williams is known throughout the state as an expert in commercial and industrial roofing techniques. In this article, he explains what you can do to manage their own job sites.
Once you hire a roofing contractor, your job as the homeowner or building owner is far from done. If you want a job done right, then you cant expect to just hire a roofer, write a check, and go home until the job is finished. That, unfortunately, is not how it works. If you want your roofing job to be done right and on time, then it is important that you properly manage the job site and stay on top of what is happening.
Daily visits to the construction site are definitely necessary if you want a job done correctly. Homeowners should be doing daily inspections and checking in on their roofing contractors to make sure everything is happening on time and staying on schedule. That includes going on the roof, too, since there is no way to know what is really going on without going up to check it out. Otherwise, if you dont take the time to visit the job site on a frequent basis, there is a high probability that those roofers could be falling behind on the project and not letting you know.
When you visit the construction site to make inspections, you need to make sure to bring the original contract along, too. The contract that you sign at the beginning of a job should list every single thing that needs to be done for that roof to be finished. That goes back to hiring the right roofing contractor in the first place, of course, because any reputable company will be specific about what you can expect and write that within the contract. So you, then, need to make sure that the contract lists everything that needs to be done along with a timetable, and that everything is spelled out concretely in that contract. When that is the case, it makes it much easier to go to the job site and ensure everything is being done in the way that it was promised.
So you need to be visiting the site daily, asking to go on the roof to check things out, and having meetings with your contractor every day to talk about the progress. Specifics needs to be mentioned, and the contractor should be willing to give you specific details of what has and has not happened yet.
Going up on the roof yourself to visually inspect the job is going to be the only way to ensure that the roofers have not taken shortcuts on the workmanship. Plenty of roofers out there will do this, and there are plenty of opportunities to take shortcuts in this industry. But that is why showing up at the job site daily is so important. Otherwise, things could get messed up fast if you are not careful.
Continually, people underestimate how important it is to manage a project well. If you do not think you are going to be able to handle that, then you need to send a representative to the site who can verify that everything is being done in the way it was promised. For the large commercial projects that we work on, it is common for companies to have maintenance engineers or other personnel who will watch over these things and report back to their bosses. But on an individual level, there are people that homeowners can hire for that job as well. It just needs to be someone who can look at the contract and see whether the things that are being done are matching up to that timeline. But at the end of the day, it is up to you to make sure the project is being handled efficiently and that everything is being done correctly so there wont be further maintenance issues or problems in the future.
In terms of paying your roofing contractors, that should be outlined in the contract as well. A lot of people say that you should never pay anybody beforehand, but for big jobs that is almost never the case. Almost all major roofing jobs require a certain percentage of the total fee to be paid before work starts. In the largest jobs, this up front fee ranges from 30% to 50% of the costs, and then usually whenever materials are delivered you will make additional payments. On other large jobs, there might be a schedule set out that requires four or five payment installments during the course of the project, with one larger payment scheduled for the end.
On smaller roofing jobs, though, it can sometimes be common for homeowners to pay their roofing contract at the end of the construction. So this is going to be something that has to be worked out on an individual basis with the company that you hire.
