Roofers

We had a new roof installed over the past three days.  The gang of eight men went down to the bare rafters as is visible in the photo on the right.  The men were Mexican, Nicaraguan, Vietnamese and the boss was Korean.  They did a first rate professional job.

Someone has put out the word in San Francisco that home repair workers are judged by the way they clean up.  This team, Summit Roofing, cleaned up every day and left the area around the house cleaner than they found it.  Considering that they removed an entire roof and took it to the dump… that was quite a mess.

I think people judge home repair workers by how clean they leave the work place.

We had a tree pruning crew in in January (Costello's) and they did an immaculate job too.

Comments

[Old friend Charlie]

I recently watched a neighboring house get a new roof - a Mexican-American outfit with a 100% ethnic Mexican (although mostly bilingual, I believe) crew. They tore off the old roof and left a mess around the house. Excellent new roof though, including new 5/8" sheeting.

The mess left behind had nothing to do with national origin or character - it had to do with the contract that was negotiated by the owner of the house. It costs something to clean up after an old roof is torn off. Some people prefer to pay less and handle the clean-up on their own. The owner (also ethnic Mexican) hired a young man for cash to do the pick-up part of the job. The owner also complained about the mess, though. That's part of the deal too - you get to complain to anyone who will listen.

Some roofers prefer to always handle the pick-up, because they want to attract more business based on the job they did. Other roofing outfits don't much care, one way or the other.

Get one of those new metal roofs and you won't have to worry about it for a hundred years!

The main thing is to be sure that your roofer carries the required workers' comp insurance - otherwise you could find that your house has a lien against it, when somebody falls off the roof!

[Old friend Charlie]

A few years back, I was outside in the yard watching a roofing crew do an outstanding job on my neighbor's steep roof. I went inside and idly turned the radio on - to get a talk show that coincidentally was talking about the "fact" that Americans would not or could not do certain kinds of work, such as roofing! I took a look out the window to verify my earlier impression - and, sure enough, the entire crew was flagrantly redneck white-bread American. Who wudda thunk it?

I can believe that Summit Roofing did a great job for MP. with its multinational crew. I cannot and do not believe that there are ANY jobs that Americans cannot or will not do. (It's unclear to me if the Summit Roofing crew was predominantly American, or not - since there are U.S. citizens, and residents becoming citizens, who are Mexican, Nicaraguan and Vietnamese, while there are many Korean Americans.) If there are any such jobs, then - by all means - let's find innovative ways to outsource them!

BTW: That redneck crew left my neighbor's house clean as a whistle and without a shingle cluttering up the yard - and it was also a job that started with a messy tearing off of an old multi-layered roof. Also, my neighbor, not even close to high-income, shopped around to find a contractor - she didn't want a yahoo salesman to come around, but she did want a licensed and bonded contractor. That was in Lane County, Oregon - outside of Eugene. Circa 1999. True story.