It’s common to make certain mistakes when it comes to getting help with your roof from roofing contractors, Canton MI. Fortunately, where others have made mistakes, you don’t have to go down the same road as a result. Here are some common errors when it comes to roofing and getting roofing contractors.

Common Hands-on Problems

• Starter Shingle Issues-Especially in the case where you aren’t using any other help when it comes to roofing, installing shingles incorrectly, especially starter shingles, is going to be a huge problem. Anyone trying to do this by themselves, even for a minute, is often going to risk getting into big trouble. You have to do it just right with the starter shingles right along the eaves or you can end up with mistakes that cost a lot of money. That’s why the guidance of a professional is so important.
• Overhang-Non-professionals also often end up with having the shingles overhang too much over the roof. The ideal hang is within a narrow range of around an inch depending on other factors. The truth is that it’s not especially difficult to end up with overhang if you don’t work with a professional or just let them do it. The consequences of having even the smallest overhang it that the shingles could blow right off in high winds. If you have the hang be too little, then you could end up with water seeping in too much. Either of these things could cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars of damages.
• Bad Nailing-Another common mistake is to mess up when hammering nails into shingles. Those who don’t have enough experience doing this could end up allowing shingles to slip out of position if the correct nailing technique isn’t used. You could also have the problem of not nailing enough times. Depending on the situation, you have to use the right number of nails per shingle, or you’re going to end up with the possibility of shingles getting out of place and not protecting the roof properly, or else they could fall off entirely. It’s also important to know exactly how many nails you need if the situation changes such as if you have a steeper grade. It’s also common to drive nails into or above the sealing strip along with many other nailing errors that could cost you thousands if you don’t hire a pro.
• Other Common Issues-Other mistakes that beginners and non-professionals regularly make include failing to align shingles in the right way, which could lead to leaks and other problems. Someone could fail to properly allow for venting on attics and ceilings. This can lead to serious problems due to water building up under the roof over time if the moisture has nowhere to go. This could weaken parts of the roof such as the shingles. It’s also common for people to not expose the right amount of each shingle. If it’s too short then it could collect moisture, for example.

The point of all of this is that you’re really going to want a contractor to do anything that you’re the least bit worried about. It’s going to be a lot safer and a lot more of a sure bet. You’ll sleep better at night.

Waiting Too Long

Another big mistake that beginners make is waiting until water is pouring down everywhere in their roof, or else huge air drafts are coming in throughout the house, before calling someone for help. Most roofing problems are going to be too difficult for beginners or amateurs to handle completely on their own.

It’s also hard to overstate just how much jumping on top of the problem early can help, and how much the problems can multiply and get worse and worse if you wait. This is especially a problem in situations where you start trying to do something yourself, but leave it unfinished, for example. If a project is too big for what you’re capable of doing based on your experience, tools, and skillset, it’s better to admit it earlier rather than later.

In other words, it’s also a serious problem if you try to do something yourself when you aren’t ready. This can be a serious error.

Failing to Vet Your Residential Roofing Contractors

It makes sense that during an emergency you’re going to want to get a contractor as quickly as possible. If your leak is literally leaking right now and water is pouring down on your head, it’s not exactly going to be easy thinking calmly and methodically.

However, this is exactly what you need to do. If it is that bad, you should likely go over a friend’s house or get a hotel anyway. Then, you need to do your due diligence and make sure that you avoid the following related mistakes.

Failing to Check for Certifications

You’re definitely going to want to check to make sure that any contractor you go with has proper certifications. These certifications tend to be specific to manufacturers. So, it’s worth checking what manufacturers handled your roof or another aspect of your house, and then to check to see whether the contractor your considering is fully certified in each of those manufacturers.

The best contractors will be certified in many multiple companies including the major ones like Renewal by Anderson or Majestic Sliding. There are many manufacturers out there, so try to make sure that your contractor is certified with the appropriate ones.

Failing to Check Licenses and Insurance

Any contractor worth their salt will have copies of their licenses available for your view. You should be able to look at it and confirm that it’s valid in your area in Michigan. It should include the MI contractor license number so you could potentially make inquiries to double check that the certification is legitimate.

You’re also going to want to make sure that the contractor has liability coverage for a fair amount. Ideally, it should be a maximum of up to one or two million dollars. This will help protect you if a worker injures themselves while working on your house. That way, the worker will be compensated from the insurance and you’ll be fully protected.

Not Checking the BBB

It’s important to check for reviews and other information on contractors. If you check a review site like the Better Business Bureau, you can check that the contractor has a phone number, an address, and other contact information so that you can be sure that the place you’re looking at is legitimate. The Better Business Bureau will also have a letter grade based on statistics related to that company. It will measure things like how many complaints they have total, how many they’ve adequately answered, how long the company has been along, and so on.

Not all companies are registered with the BBB, but a large percentage at least have some kind of entry on the site, including from former customers. The site is a great place to start when vetting a company to make sure they are legit and to check for any potential problems from the contractor before you get too involved.

Not Checking General Reviews

You are going to miss quite a lot if you don’t look at the reviews in various locations including:

• On the Site Itself-Obviously, you may need to take some of the reviews from the site itself with a grain of sale, but many sites post legitimate reviews. They just may fail to post any negative reviews. You can still potentially learn a lot doing it this way.
• Yelp-This is one of the most popular sites available online for finding out about what other customers who have actually used a site think of it. If you don’t check it out for the specific business at the specific relevant location, then you’re really missing out on a large amount of potentially useful information. This could include details about what kind of roofing work the customer needed help on, and how the contractor handled it. There could be also details about how long they took to perform the work, what the costs were, and just about anything else that you can think of in general.
• Google-Google has the advantage of being easy to check quickly since it tends to come right up. It will also often give you a much larger number of possible reviews with other review sites considering how popular it is. You can get a good overview of exactly how the public tends to feel in general about a particular company, all in a single snapshot.

Going with an Uncommunicative Contractor

If you contact a contractor a problem that you have with your roof, especially if it’s an emergency, then you really shouldn’t have to wait more than a day or two to hear back from them. If it does take days to weeks to get them to respond, this is often a bad sign that there’s something wrong with the contractor and they won’t be able to really help the way you want anyway.

Ideally, you should be able to contact them through a live agent right on their site. The best ones will have agents up all the time during business hours so that you can just click on the chat button, usually in one of the corners of the site, and get a person to talk to right away. If you’re contacting them after hours, make sure to leave a message, and then see how quickly they get back to you when it’s business hours again. This will tell you a lot about the dedication of the company to timely responses. There will also often be a phone number you can call to get quick help as well, which is going to be important during emergencies.

Failing to Check Expertise

If you have a certain thing you need repaired on your roof, or else need a new roof entirely, it’s important to make sure that the contractor you’re working with has expertise in this area, and experience with getting it done. This includes any specific extra problem you have that caused the roofing issue in the first place. One of the ways for checking for this would be to look around and see what kind of information they have about their services such as doing roofing, masonry, siding, general overhang, or other relevant services that work with roofing.

Other Considerations

What these mistakes all come down to is being careful and making sure that you know the characteristics a company has and whether you can trust them, as well as what you can and can’t handle yourself in terms of roof repair.

Other things you can check to help vet out a company include their social media links. Some of the best companies will have links to places like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This way, you can check each of the media pages and see what kind of content they have there. This will help in a few different ways. For example, you’ll be able to see how potential customers on those sites react to the contractor. There will likely be both potential customers and current customers there and the comments could give you useful information.

You can also look at the content itself to ascertain whether you find the contractors who made the content are knowledgeable and know what they are doing. It can be an effective way to get full information on a particular company, in other words.

Summing Up: How to Get Started Fixing Your Roof

We are the best roofers in Canton Michigan. Contact us today for roof repair, new roof, roof emergency, shingle roofing, roof leaks, or anything else related in the Canton Michigan area. Make sure you go ahead and don’t hesitate to contact us today for any roofing problem you might have.

The faster you contact us, the faster we can help you out with your problem and make sure that you have a satisfactory result.