Somewhere around day nine or ten, two documents land in your life within about a week of each other. One is your carrier's scope: the work they have decided your policy covers, priced with their software. The other is a roofer's estimate: what the roof actually needs to be a roof again. People assume these are the same document written twice. They are not, and the gap between them is where almost every argument in this trade happens.
We print them as two columns on one page, side by side, because that is the only way to see the gap. This note explains how to read that page — ours, or anybody else's.
Line items are a language, and it is learnable
Carrier scopes are written in estimating software that most contractors also use, so the vocabulary is shared. A line reads roughly: quantity, unit, description, unit price, total. The units matter more than they look. Roofing is priced per square — one hundred square feet — so "28.4 SQ" is not twenty-eight of anything you can see from the ground; it is about 2,840 square feet of roof surface, which is not the same as the square footage of your house because roofs are sloped and have overhangs.
A handful of abbreviations do most of the work:
- SQ — a square, 100 sq ft of roof plane. Everything on a shingle roof is quoted this way.
- LF — linear feet. Ridge, hip, valley, drip edge, gutter apron and starter course are all LF items.
- EA — each. Pipe boots, vents, turtle vents and turbines.
- R&R — remove and replace. The line covers tear-off and new material.
- D&R — detach and reset. Something is taken off, kept, and put back — satellite dishes, solar attachments, gutters that are still good.
- O&P — overhead and profit, usually applied as a percentage when a job involves several trades.
If you can read those six, you can read most of the page. If a line on either column contains a term neither of us has explained, that is a question for the person who wrote it, and it is a fair one to ask.
The three ways the columns differ
Almost every difference between the two columns is one of three kinds, and it helps enormously to know which kind you are looking at before you react to it.
- Quantity differences. Both columns agree the item is needed; they disagree about how much. This is usually a measurement question and it is the easiest kind to resolve, because a roof is a measurable object. Aerial measurement reports, our own tape, and the adjuster's own diagram can be laid on top of each other.
- Scope differences. One column has a line the other does not. Decking replacement, ice-and-water at the valleys, a new drip edge, or the disposal of a second layer nobody knew was under the first. These are the ones worth talking about carefully, because some of them are code requirements in your parish and some of them are our recommendation, and those are genuinely different arguments.
- Price differences. Both columns have the line, both agree on quantity, and the unit price is not the same. After a large storm this is often a materials market moving faster than a pricing database updates.
We label each difference on our page with which of the three it is. It stops a conversation about a measurement turning into a conversation about honesty.
What "not covered" does and does not mean
A line your carrier did not include is not a line your roof does not need. It is a line your policy, as your carrier reads it, does not pay for. Those are different sentences and the difference is your money.
So anything in our column that is not in theirs gets priced separately and clearly, and you decide about it as a purchase rather than as part of a claim. Some of those decisions are easy — a $60 pipe boot on a roof that is already open is not a decision, it is arithmetic. Some are not easy, and the honest answer is that they are yours to make with a real number in front of you.
We do not tell you what your carrier will approve, what you will be paid, or what your deductible will be. Nobody outside your carrier can, and anybody who does is guessing with your money. What we can put in writing is what the roof needs and what it costs to do properly.
Depreciation, in one paragraph
You will see two totals on the carrier column and they will not match. One is the replacement cost of the work. The other subtracts an amount for the age and wear of what is being replaced. Which of those two figures actually reaches you, and whether the difference is recoverable afterwards, depends entirely on the policy you hold — some policies recover it once the work is complete and invoiced, some never do. Read your own declarations page, or ring your carrier and ask them to read it to you. It is the single most useful ten minutes in the whole month, and it is the one nobody tells you to spend.
Four questions worth asking about any estimate
- What happens if the decking underneath is soft? Is there an allowance, at what rate, and will I see a photograph of every sheet before it is replaced?
- Is haul-off, permit and dumpster in this number, or added later?
- Which lines here are code requirements in this parish, and which are your recommendation?
- If the carrier's approved scope changes after work starts, what happens to this price?
Ask them of us. Ask them of the next two companies you speak to. A firm that cannot answer them in plain sentences on the phone is not going to become clearer once there is a dumpster on your drive.
Why we put it on one page
There is a version of this trade where the homeowner never sees the two columns — where a contractor takes the carrier's number, does the carrier's scope, and quietly leaves out the things the carrier left out. It is not fraud and it is not rare. It is just a roof that is slightly less of a roof than it looked on paper, and you find out about it in four years.
The two-column page is more work for us and it produces more questions, which is the point. It is also the document that makes the rest of the sequence make sense: it is the reason stage six has a fixed price before anybody nails anything down, and it is the reason nothing is a surprise at close-out.