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 a long time.  They have gotten a bad name cause when there is a problem with their work, they're sometimes 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 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 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 if its a commercial roof job, then whats 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 on 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.

In the roofing industry, the roofing company sometimes gets called out to these jobs, and when we ask who did the job, it can sometimes become a Grey area for the owner to elaborate on?  Either he or she knows or they don't want to say?  

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 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 could 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.  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 are in those books?  If not then thats a pretty clear indication of a fly by night outfit.