Two quotes on the same Melissa roof can land a long way apart, and the first thing you feel is that one of them has to be wrong. Usually neither one is. They're describing two different jobs on the same house, and once you know where two quotes split, you can hold them next to each other and see which one is pricing your whole roof.
Two numbers, two different jobs
A replacement price is the sum of a couple dozen decisions, and two estimates can land on different sides of several of them without either one being careless. One assumes the old flashing goes back down. The other prices new metal at every place the roof is interrupted. One counts the decking as sound. The other carries an allowance for board replacement in case it isn't. Neither of those is a lie. They're two prices for two different pieces of work.
So the totals are the last place to start. They're the bottom line of two documents that haven't been held against each other yet, and the whole difference lives in the lines above them. That part is worth an hour of your evening, and it's less work than it sounds, because most of the gap sits in three or four places.
You're also not being asked to referee anybody. You're answering one question about your own house: which of these two documents describes the roof you have, including the parts you can't see from the driveway? Some of those parts are hail damage that never shows from the yard, and an estimate that never mentions them is answering a different question.
Where two Melissa quotes part company
Layers are usually the first split. Whether there's one covering on the deck or two changes the tear-off, the dumpster and the labor all at once, and in a town where most houses are still wearing their first roof, a second layer is the exception. Decking is the second split, and it's the one nobody can settle until the old surface comes off. An estimate that names a rate for board replacement is doing something different from one that carries a single number for the whole deck.
The rest of the gap tends to sit in a short list of lines. Find these in both documents before you compare a single total, because this is where two numbers quietly stop describing the same roof.
- Whether the old covering comes off the deck or the new one goes over the top of it.
- How soft decking is handled once the boards are uncovered, and at what stated rate.
- Which shingle line is being installed, named as a product you can look up.
- Whether the flashing at chimneys, sidewalls and valleys is new metal or the old metal reset.
- Whether the vents and the ridge go back exactly as they are or get reworked.
- Whether the dumpster, the haul-away and the final cleanup sit inside the number or outside it.
What our roofers name on an estimate
A complete estimate describes your house before it prices it, and that is what makes two of them comparable. You see the size in squares, measured on the roof. You see the material by product line and color. Every interruption has its own line, the chimney, the sidewalls, the pipe boots, the valleys, with what happens at each one beside it. The vents show as reinstalled or reworked. Board replacement carries a stated rate and an assumed number of sheets, so you can see the assumption and what happens if the count grows past it. Those interruptions are also where a Melissa roof starts leaking first, which is why a quote that skips them is skipping the part that fails.
A document like that survives being picked up a week later by somebody who wasn't standing in your driveway, and it survives being held next to the other one. That is the real job of a written scope. Two documents naming the same work can be compared line for line, and two that can't be compared are telling you that one of them left something out.
None of that asks you to become a roofing expert by Thursday. It asks you to check that two documents about one roof cover the same roof. When our roofers write one, the lines are there to be argued with, and the cheaper of your two quotes may still be the better one once the missing lines are added and priced.
The one line that can still move
Decking is the honest exception, and it's worth knowing about before you treat either number as final. Boards that took water at some point don't announce themselves while the shingles are still on top of them. Anybody promising a final deck figure before the tear-off is promising something nobody can see yet. What a good estimate does instead is put a boundary around it: a stated rate per sheet, and a call to you before the count grows.
Our roofers settle the rest of it before anything starts. Anything knowable from the roof belongs on the page while you're still deciding, so you meet it in the document instead of hearing it called up from a ladder halfway through a Tuesday.
When two quotes measure two different roofs
Before any of the lines, check the size. Two quotes on one house can carry different square counts, because one came off a tape on the roof and the other off an aerial image. If two documents disagree about how big your roof is, they were never going to agree about anything below that.
The same goes for the parts of the house that aren't the main field. A low-slope porch roof, a second-story slope nobody reaches from a ladder, and a detached garage all either appear on both quotes or they don't, and a missing one is a common reason a number lands low. Steep and high are slower to work, so a quote that carries the hard part of your roof is carrying a longer day than one that leaves it off.
A smaller number is sometimes a smaller job
A gap between two quotes isn't proof that one of them is padded. Often it's the difference between a roof that comes off and a roof that goes back on over the old one, or between new metal at the chimney and the same metal bent back down. Both of those are legitimate jobs. They just don't leave you in the same place eight years from now.
So the question underneath the two numbers isn't which document to trust. It's which roof you're buying, and how long you want it to hold before anybody is back up there. The roofing prices page covers what a whole-roof number is built from, and the same parts show up on both of the quotes on your table.
That's a smaller decision than it felt like on Monday. You're not grading two companies against each other. You're deciding which description of your own roof you believe is complete, and Melissa Roofing Co would rather you decide that with both documents open than take anybody's word for it.
If you're holding two quotes that disagree, send Melissa Roofing Co the address and what each one says. One of our roofers goes up, looks at the roof both of them describe, and puts the whole job in writing, line by line, so you can set the three documents next to each other. You keep that estimate either way.
Send both quotes over