Comments on: A roof over our heads?

By: the imbroglio » Blog Archive » Moving madness: Let’s get it started

Sat, 27 May 2006 11:23:39 +0000

[...] Oh, and that whole roof imbroglio? It remains completely unresolved except that we have an estimate for a new roof at $5,000-$6,000 (which is what I thought), and confirmation from a professional roofer that roofs made of this strange “woodruf” stuff are nothing but trouble. So we’re still waiting to hear whether the seller will deal on that. If not, we’ll have to start our home search over again. Awesome. [...]

By: ap

ap — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:08:01 +0000

Hey T — I tried emailing you back and gmail returned with an error message. What gives? Can you give me alternative email to reach you? Thanks!

By: Will

Will — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:07:32 +0000

What’s your contract say about this? Does this roof stuff give you an out? If so, you can use that as a bargaining tool with the seller.

By: josiah

josiah — Tue, 23 May 2006 13:52:19 +0000

I think you should at least try to negotiate the cost of the new roof off of the purchase price. I mean, what are they going to say? They can’t fairly say that they had already accounted for the cost of a new roof in their asking price, because they didn’t tell you about that problem. If they’re really resistant and you really want the place, you could always do a partial reduction.Also, I missed you at grad. But my father has been making noises about a motorcycle trip to Montana. I hope you don’t mind if I invite myself over sometime in the next three years.

By: raquel

raquel — Tue, 23 May 2006 13:25:38 +0000

You could get real cedar shakes, but it’ll cost more to have that done than for plain ol’ shingles. You might be able to negotiate the cost of a new roof off the selling price, if the seller isn’t willing to pay to have the work done before closing (which, if the roof isn’t currently leaking, I wouldn’t bet on). Of course, if it’s not currently leaking, that’s also good, because if you have to pay for it, at least you probably won’t have to do it immediately.

This is rather timely–thanks to a giant hail storm in early April, new roofs are sprouting all over our neighborhood. Ours is only a few years old, and things looked okay from our admittedly amateur self-inspection (dented gutters, mostly–I’m more worried about the holes punched in the vinyl siding on our garage, since that lets water in, and our one broken storm window), but the more we hear about damage around us, the more we’re thinking we might need to have it looked at. No way we’d replace it ourselves, though. I can’t stand heights and even normally brave E. about fainted when he climbed up to take a look at our roof vents!

Yeah, and you should see my dent-resistant Saturn, too…