In this episode, Jerry talks about some of the worst-case scenario roof loss situations he’s seen, and what our homeowners can do to protect themselves from such financial loss.
Podcast Transcription: RoofLifeB030-206
Shayla: You are listening to the Roof Life of Oregon podcast and I’m talking with Jerry. Jerry, tell me a little bit about it, you say you have a client, and the roof installation he got previously led to a lawsuit. How did that happen and how can someone avoid that or learn more about that for themselves?
Jerry: We do run across that quite often, believe it or not, to where we go to a house that’s a fairly new roof and it has prematurely failed because of one reason or another. We had a client in particular who had two things that made his roof fail. One was the poor product. The product itself had a lawsuit against it and it just failed and it was a very well-known issue for this particular type of roofing. It was a synthetic style roofing and so he needed to get it replaced. When we went to his house to do the inspection, we go inside your attic to see what is going on, because that was the heartbeat of your home. When we got into his attic, we noticed that there was black microbial growth everywhere inside it. Now, this is a fairly new house, mind you. The house itself was only around ten to fifteen years old and so it doesn’t take very long for that kind of stuff to grow and show its face.
And what we found out was the builder who built the house did not do the ventilation to what the Oregon code requires. The Oregon code requires you need to have one cubic inch of airflow for every 150 available cubic feet. I know that means nothing, so don’t try to understand it, just give us a call and we’ll help you out with that. But long story short, the builder did not put the roof deck together correctly. And so, therefore, it not only made the material fail, it made the house fail.
So he had to tear out all this roofing, he had to tear out the plywood, and we had to put all new plywood down and new roofing. This was a very, very expensive project. It cost this homeowner right around $90,000 to fix everything. It was a big deal.
Sadly, when we go to all these homes on a daily basis, especially me, I go to these homes and I look inside the attic, it is a very common problem. Most builders don’t do anything about it. Most roofers don’t do anything about it. The only reason this guy was able to do anything was that he had some help with the lawsuit and everything, but not everybody is going to have that advantage. The best thing is to give us a call and let us look through everything and just see where your ventilation is at. Not so you can sue somebody. We don’t want you to do that. We want just to have a healthy house.
Shayla: I guess the best thing to do would be to work with someone who understands ventilation and the codes in the first place, right?
Jerry: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And we do. We take time. We go to class every year to learn about it. We have continuing education. Every other Tuesday we sit down and go through meetings and we learn new products, features, and things that we can do. So we’re always trying to evolve because we do not want to set you up for failure. We want you to have a very comfortable home to live in with an awesome roof that keeps the rain out and just keeps everybody healthy inside. It’s very important to us.
Shayla: Alright so avoid the costly damage, the hassle, and the headache and reach out to a team that understands the codes and the ventilation requirements to keep your home and roof healthy. You can reach out to the team at Roof Life of Oregon. Thanks, Jerry.