Roofing By Night

The roofing industry is as old as the days man built houses out of straw, mud, and stone.  Since this time there has always been the statement "Fly- By-Night" or as this page refers "Roofing By Night".  The reference refers to workers that are not here for the long haul.  They have gotten a bad name cause when there is a problem with their work, they're always nowhere to be found?

With the frustrated human mindset of a unhappy owner of a leaky roof, they in many cases refer to "I got taken by a Fly-by-night contractor" or "I think they were fly-by-night"  or they simply pretend to know nothing, and let the new reputable contractor do the guessing of what took place?  When the roofing group gets called out to these types of jobs, it's salesperson or roofing contractor needs to get an idea of what took place in order to help solve the problem.  The home-owner needs to understand why we need to ask these questions.  

Home owners sometimes get upset when we have to ask so many questions about their roof system?  We simply need to investigate the job.  When we are called out to a site where there is a leak, we do not know anything from a visual inspection other then really obvious signs.  We cant tell how many roofs are under the current roof, or lets say if its a commercial roof, then what's the substrate?  This is why in some cases the roof may cost money for a proper valuation?  In this case we may have to perform cut tests in one or two areas of the roof.  This will give us an evaluation of what the previous roofing contractor did.  Once we have this info it enables us to give recommendations to correct the problem, but the inspections do cost money.

In the roofing industry, the roofing company sometimes gets called out to problem jobs, and when we ask who did the job, it can sometimes become a Grey area for the home or building owner to elaborate on?  Either he or she knows or they don't want to say?  We always say "It's OK to tell us".  We're not here to laugh or judge.  We're here to help you. 

The funny thing with a fly-by-night roofer is that society itself tries to evaluate them in one sentence, but it cant.  Many fly-by-night contractors can and have done half decent jobs, and their roofs depending on how good the material was can actually last the duration of what an average roof is suspected to last.  The problem is that they are a two way street.  Sometimes a home-owner can get lucky with a fly-by-night roofer, and other times not.  

Fly-by-night roofers have been around for hundreds of years.  They originally developed in America, and they didn't set up shop to actually do bad work originally.  They set up shop so they could move to another state.  The reason for this is so they could travel the whole US while working.  As soon as they saved up enough money, they would move on to the next state.  After seeing America, they began with the world.  Believe it or not this is its real foundation.  Many of these people are just average people, but they have a different mindset on reality.  They don't believe in setting up shop for the long term.  You could call them ignorant and self centered people, but they simply don't feel like they need to be held accountable for anything.  They feel that life is about enjoyment, and many could sympathize with that statement;  However when they're installing a roof over your head, it becomes a different theory.  They got names of Gypsies, hippies, and losers in the 80's era?

Most fly-by-night contractors are easy to find.  They can be found knocking at your front door to even a listing in the Telus yellow-pages directory.  Many fly-by-night contractors will stay in an area for no more then 5 years max before moving on.  They can move on to another state or into a local volume company that doesn't check them out, because they are too busy for that.  If your about to hire a fly-by-night contractor and don't know it then just check your local Action Pages book or even the silly yellow-pages.  What you want to do is locate older books and see if they're in those books?  If not then that's a pretty clear indication of a fly-by-night outfit.