The asphalt shingles on our roof are about shot, and we've resigned ourselves to getting the roof done this year. The one deterrent so far is that we just don't trust the bids we're getting.
For example, over the phone, one contractor told me that based on my description of the size of the job (2200 sq. ft. rectangular ranch, fairly shallow roof pitch, only a couple of valleys in connection with the attached garage, no other complexities except for one big skylight), we're probably looking at around $6-7K. But when his estimator came out and we got the official bid, it was like $12K!
My suspicion is that once they saw that we were in a "nicer" neighborhood, they assumed we could afford more (we can't) and they padded the bid by a large amount.
What I'd like to be able to do is come up with an estimate of the
*actual* cost of labor and materials for our roof and use that as a basis for assessing the realism of the bids we get. Any advice?Alternatively, how much of the work could I theoretically do myself? Certainly ripping off the old shingles isn't rocket science, and I tend to doubt that installing new ones is either, though it's admittedly labor-intensive.
____________ Grant Petty University of Wisconsin-Madison Browse my new book "A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation" at