This is the substantive page. It is written for homeowners who want to understand what they are looking at, and for anyone comparing proposals and wondering why two roofers looking at the same house arrived at different answers.
The order matters more than the individual steps. Doing it in this sequence means the roof surface is examined with a hypothesis already in hand, rather than scanned hopefully for something obvious.
Almost everything worth knowing is visible from underneath, and almost nobody looks. Daylight at the deck edges. Staining on rafters and trusses, and which direction it runs. Rusted nail points, which mean condensation rather than a leak. Insulation that is matted or dark where air has been moving through it. Prior repairs nobody mentioned. A roofer who has priced your roof without going in the attic has priced an assumption.
A full lap of the house before anyone puts up a ladder. Roof planes read against each other for sag or a line that is no longer straight. Fascia and soffit condition, which report on years of runoff and on whether the intake ventilation is even open. Gutters checked for accumulated granules — a roof that is shedding its surface tells you so down here first.
Then the roof itself, starting where roofs actually leak. Pipe boots, whose collars perish in this sun long before the surrounding roof is finished. Vents and curbs. Valleys. Wall terminations and step flashing, where the failure is usually that somebody relied on sealant instead of building a lap. Skylights and chimneys. And every place a slope ties into a low-slope section — a lanai, a porch, an addition — which in Florida is the most reliably problematic detail on a house.
Only now the open surface. On shingle: granule loss, cupping, brittleness underfoot, whether the sealant strips ever bonded, and fastener placement — overdriven, underdriven, or high above the nail line. On tile: cracked and slipped pieces, foot-traffic damage, the state of the ridge and hip work, and the age of the underlayment beneath, because on a tile roof the tile is the wear surface and the underlayment is the roof. On metal: seams, panel movement, and exposed fastener gaskets, which are the clock on that system.
Walked deliberately, feeling for the softness that means sheathing has taken on water, and noting what the deck is: plywood, or the board sheathing common on the region’s older houses, which behaves differently and fastens differently. Any honest replacement quote states what happens when bad decking is found, at what price per sheet, before the tear-off starts — not after the house is open.
What the rest of the street is doing is free information. A subdivision built in one stretch got one generation of roofs from a small number of builders, and their failure pattern is a preview of yours. So is the history of the individual house: previous repairs, whether they were done by someone who understood the assembly, and whether anything has been changed on the roof since it was built.
A five-year roofer has watched roofs go on. A forty-year roofer has watched them come back off, which is a different curriculum and cannot be taken early. These are the specific lessons that only long exposure teaches.
Not “what brand of shingle?” and not “how much?”. Ask what they found in the attic, and what they intend to do about the flashings, the boots and the ventilation.
A roofer who can answer that in specifics has looked at your house. A roofer who cannot has priced a square-foot number off a satellite image, and the difference will show up in year twelve rather than next week.
These are not selling points. They are the non-negotiable parts of doing the work properly, and they are the first things to disappear when a job is priced too thin or run too fast.
The afternoon storm is a certainty for much of the year, not a risk. Tear-off is sized to what can be dried in before it arrives, every time, even when that costs a day. The alternative is a homeowner’s interior, and there is no version of the schedule that justifies it.
Pipe boots, flashings and vents come off and new ones go on. Reusing them is how a brand-new roof leaks in its second year at the one spot that was never actually replaced — and it is a saving the homeowner was never told about, which is what makes it worse than a mistake.
Sheathing is checked once it is exposed, attachment is brought to current requirements, and soft or delaminated material is replaced rather than covered. The per-sheet price for that is agreed in writing before the job starts, so nobody is negotiating with a house that is already open.
Gun pressure gets checked against the actual material and the day’s temperature, and courses get looked at while they are going on rather than admired afterwards. This is the single highest-leverage supervision on any roof, and it is only possible for somebody who has done the nailing themselves.
Valleys, wall terminations, curbs and low-slope tie-ins are constructed so that water leaves them by geometry alone. Sealant goes on afterwards as a finish and a second line, never as the mechanism. If a detail only works because of what came out of a tube, it has a service life measured in Florida summers.
Landscaping and the pool cage protected before anything comes off, the driveway kept usable, and the yard swept with a magnet more than once — because roofing nails find tyres and bare feet for years. How a crew leaves a property is a fair proxy for how it treated the parts of the roof nobody can see.
A person’s standards are best described by what they decline. Each of these is available money that gets left on the table, on purpose, every year.
Layering new material over old is the fastest way to a cheap number and it forfeits everything that matters: the deck is never inspected, rot is sealed in rather than found, the assembly runs hotter, and the result is heavier and harder for whoever has to take it off. It exists to win bids, not to protect houses.
Selling a full replacement to somebody who needs one boot and two flashings is the obvious version. The quieter version is selling a repair on a roof that is genuinely finished, because the repair is easier to say yes to. Both are the same failure: telling a homeowner what closes the sale rather than what the roof is doing.
Waiving, absorbing, rebating or quietly building an insurance deductible into a price is illegal in Florida, and it is offered constantly after a storm. It is also the most useful signal a homeowner will ever get: a contractor willing to defraud an insurer on your behalf has already told you how they will handle the parts of your roof you cannot see.
Expiring discounts, a price that is only good today, a clipboard produced before the attic has been looked at, and a contingency agreement pushed on a homeowner who has not read it. Urgency is a sales instrument in this trade, and after a major storm it arrives door to door in volume. A real roof problem will still be a real roof problem tomorrow.
Damage gets documented as what it is. Telling a homeowner that ordinary wear is storm damage sets them up for a denial, a wasted claim on their record, and a conversation with an adjuster who has seen the same play that week. The honest read is worth more, including the times it is the read nobody wanted.
Tile gets walked in the wrong places, pressure-washed hard enough to strip its surface, and broken by people who do not know how to move on it — frequently by other trades. Damage caused during service is repaired, not left for the owner to discover, and no tile roof gets treated as a surface you can simply stand anywhere on.
Straight answers to the six questions that come up on nearly every roof, whether or not there is any work involved.
It comes down to whether the roof is leaking or failing. A localised problem on a roof whose materials are still sound — a pipe boot, a flashing detail, storm damage in one area — is a repair, and should be sold as one. A roof that is losing its granules broadly, has gone brittle underfoot, or has failing details on several unrelated planes at once is telling you it is at the end of its service life, and repairs on it become a subscription. The attic usually settles the question faster than the roof surface does.
Less than the number printed on the wrapper, in most cases. Manufacturer ratings are not weathering guarantees, and this climate is harder on a roof than the conditions those ratings assume. Ventilation, the quality of the original installation, the slope and exposure of the roof, and how much shade and debris it takes on move the real figure far more than the choice of product does. Anyone who answers this question with a confident number before seeing the house is quoting a brochure.
Each is right in different circumstances, and the honest answer depends on the house. Shingle is the most economical and by far the easiest to repair well. Tile lasts a very long time as a surface — but on a tile roof the underlayment is the waterproofing, so the thing that will need attention first is the part you cannot see, and re-roofing a tile house is a different project from replacing one. Metal is excellent when it is the right profile, properly detailed, and installed by people who do it regularly; it is unforgiving of the ones who do not. The structure, the roof geometry, the budget and how long the owner plans to keep the house all matter more than a general ranking.
Fastening, and it is not close. Nails driven too deep cut through the mat and lose their hold, nails left proud keep the next course off the deck, and nails placed above the nail line fasten one layer where they should have caught two. None of it is visible from the ground on the day the job is finished, all of it passes a homeowner’s inspection, and it is a leading reason roofs come apart early in high wind. It is also entirely a supervision problem rather than a materials problem.
No, and assuming so leads to repairs that fix nothing. In this climate a good number of stains are condensation from an attic that cannot breathe, and others come from plumbing or the air handler. The underside tells you which. A leak leaves a defined path that tracks back uphill to an entry point; condensation shows up as rusted nail points, damp or matted insulation, and diffuse staining spread over a wide area with no single source. Fixing the roof will not fix the second one.
Hogan Roofing — the licensed Central Florida company Brad runs with his son Corben, working from Winter Springs. This site is a personal professional record rather than a sales channel, so estimates, repairs, replacements and storm claims all go through the company. Questions that are not a job, and are not meant to become one, are welcome on the contact page.
If you have two proposals that disagree, a stain nobody has explained, or a roof you have been told needs replacing, describe it and you will get a straight answer.