Full tear off, decking inspected sheet by sheet, and a complete new roof system installed to Florida wind code. The price is in writing before the first shingle comes off.
There are two ways to put a new roof on a house. You can lay new shingles over the old ones, which is cheaper and faster, or you can strip the roof to the wood decking and start clean. We tear off, and it is not because it bills more hours.
An overlay hides the one thing that matters most: the decking. If a sheet of plywood is soft, delaminated, or rotted around an old leak, shingles nailed over it will not hold in a windstorm, and nobody will know until they let go. An overlay also traps heat between two shingle layers, which cooks the new shingles from below in a Florida summer, and it adds dead weight the structure was never asked to carry. On top of that, the Florida Building Code limits when a roof can be covered over at all, and a roof that already has two layers must come off.
Stripping the roof costs a dumpster and a day of labor. It buys you the only honest look anyone will ever get at what your new roof is nailed to. That trade is worth it every time.
This is where roof replacements go wrong with the wrong contractor, so here is exactly how it works with us.
No one can see through shingles. On most Florida tear offs the decking is fine, but on a roof that has leaked for years, some sheets will be soft or black around the old entry points. When that happens on your job, the crew stops on that section. Someone photographs the bad wood, we show you the photos, and you see the cost of replacing those sheets before we replace them. The per sheet price for decking was already printed in your contract on day one, so there is no new number invented on your driveway while half your roof is open.
What we will never do is quote a low price knowing the decking allowance is where the margin gets made back, and we will never cover bad wood to keep a schedule. Rotten decking is a fastener problem: nails and screws do not hold in mush, and in a hurricane the decking is what your whole roof is holding onto.
Shingle brands get all the attention. In a named storm, the underlayment and the fastening pattern matter more.
Over the decking goes a sealed underlayment that acts as a secondary water barrier. If a storm ever strips shingles, this layer is what keeps rain out of your bedroom until the roof is repaired. Florida code requires it for a reason.
Nail count, nail type, and nail placement are set by the Florida Building Code wind requirements for your address, not by how fast a gun can fire. The decking itself gets renailed to current code during the replacement.
Every replacement runs on a permit, and the county inspects the work. Your paperwork also feeds the wind mitigation report many Florida homeowners use with their insurer.
Most single story shingle homes are done in one to two days once material is on site. Here is the sequence.
We measure and photograph the roof, then hand you an itemized scope: system, underlayment, flashing, vents, and the per sheet price for any decking. That document is the price. It does not move unless the scope moves, and you approve any change first.
We pull the permit, order the system, and schedule the crew. You get the dates before anything happens, and we tell you where the dumpster and delivery will sit.
The old roof comes off down to bare wood. Every sheet of decking gets walked and checked. Anything soft or rotten is photographed, shown to you, and replaced at the contract's per sheet price.
Sealed underlayment goes down the same day the roof is opened, so the house is watertight overnight. Then flashing, drip edge, vents, and the new roof covering, fastened to the wind requirements for your area.
Magnet sweep for nails, debris hauled off, and a walk around the property with you before we call it finished. The county inspector signs off on the permit, and you keep the photos from every stage.
A straightforward single story shingle roof is usually torn off and dried in on day one and finished on day one or two. Some things stretch that, and none of them should be a surprise on the day:
If your job will run long for any of these reasons, you hear it from us at the estimate, not from the crew on day two. And if you are still weighing whether the roof needs replacing at all, start with an inspection or read where a repair still makes sense.
One inspection, one itemized contract, and a straight answer on whether you need a new roof at all. We work across Florida and Georgia from Orlando; see the service areas.
Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm. Emergency roof repair outside those hours: call the same number.
