Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
The warranty is the real exposure. Shingle manufacturers specify nail placement, spacing. Stagger in detail, and work outside those specs voids coverage. On the insurance side, a homeowner doing the work gets paid at non-professional rates, not the rate a licensed contractor is paid.
Read your shingle manufacturer's own installation instructions before doing any work beyond gutters and screens.
Warranty coverage is conditioned on published specs, and small deviations are enough to void it.
Find your shingle brand and look up its installation instructions.
The risk of doing your own roof in Utah is not usually that it falls apart. It is that everything protecting you quietly stops applying while it looks fine.
Mattie Tueller, Master Roofing
Installing outside the manufacturer's published specification. Shingle makers do not just sell a product, they publish detailed instructions for how it must go on. Warranty coverage is conditioned on those instructions being followed. Deviating is not a judgment call the installer gets to make, whether that installer is a contractor or the homeowner.
None of that is visible once the roof is finished, which is exactly the problem. A roof installed outside spec looks identical to one installed correctly, right up until someone files a claim and an inspector goes looking for how it was fastened.
You get paid at non-professional rates. When an insurer covers a roof, the payment reflects what the work costs. A licensed contractor's rate includes general liability insurance and workers compensation. A homeowner carries neither of those. So the labor is valued differently and the payment is smaller.
Master Roofing once got a homeowner's roof covered at around eighteen thousand dollars. He decided to do the work himself, and insurance paid him closer to twelve. He called upset, because he had understood the covered amount to be his.
That is not the insurer being hard. It is the payout reflecting who is doing the work. The gap was roughly the cost of the protections a contractor is required to carry and a homeowner is not. That is a real difference rather than a technicality. Nobody explained that to him beforehand, and it is worth knowing before you decide.
It becomes a claim against your homeowners policy. A friend, family member, or neighbor who falls while helping with your roof is injured on your property doing work you organized. There is no contractor's workers compensation standing between you and that outcome. It is the exposure people think about least and should think about most.
Roof falls are not minor injuries. The consequences run to serious long-term harm. The financial exposure sits with the homeowner who asked for the help rather than with anyone else.
That risk exists regardless of how the roof turns out. Even a job that goes perfectly involved people on a slope, at height, moving heavy material. Every one of those hours was uninsured in a way a professional crew's hours simply are not. That gap does not close just because the job happened to go well. It is worth weighing before you ask anyone for a hand.
Much less, and that distinction is worth holding onto. Cleaning gutters, maintaining a swamp cooler, or installing gutter screens on a single-story home does not touch the waterproofing system. So it does not run into warranty specifications the way roofing work does.
Three questions sort almost every job onto one side or the other.
Which jobs fall on which side is worked through in which roof jobs a homeowner can actually do. The warranty question mostly arrives once the work involves nails and shingles rather than gutters and screens. Below that line, most of this node does not apply to you at all. The maintenance jobs stay perfectly reasonable weekend work for a careful homeowner with a stable ladder.
Shingle warranties go away almost every time a homeowner touches the roof. Master Roofing sees the consequences of that long after anybody could fix it cheaply. The specifications are really detailed: nail head size, spacing, the stagger between courses, even how tightly the plywood underneath was spaced. They also change over time. So what was right on a roof ten years ago may not be right now.
I want to be fair here. That's because none of that is obvious and none of it is common knowledge. Nobody should feel foolish for not knowing that where a nail lands in a shingle is a warranty condition. It is written down. But it is written down in places homeowners have no reason to look.
The risk of doing your own roof in Utah is not usually that it falls apart. It is that everything protecting you quietly stops applying while it looks fine. So before you buy materials, read the manufacturer's instructions for the exact shingle you are putting on. If that document changes your mind, it just saved you a great deal.
This article is general information about Utah roofs, not an assessment of yours. Every roof is different, and no article can tell you what is actually happening on your specific house. Have a licensed roofing contractor look at it in person before you act on anything here.
Many manufacturer warranties allow one transfer to a subsequent owner, usually within a defined window and sometimes with a fee or a notification requirement. The terms are specific to the product and the warranty version in effect when the roof was installed. Read the document rather than assuming, and if you are buying a house, ask the seller for it in writing.
It complicates responsibility considerably. That's because a manufacturer or a contractor asked to stand behind the roof will want to know exactly which portions they controlled. Most roofing companies will not warranty work built on top of someone else's installation. They are not being hard by declining. Split jobs tend to end with nobody clearly accountable for the finished result.
Covering the roof and paying at contractor rates are two different questions. The more common outcome is a smaller payment rather than a refusal. Where it becomes a real problem is if an adjuster connects later damage to work that did not meet code. Check your own policy language and talk to your agent before you start, not afterwards.
They get revised over time as products and testing evolve. That's why the current instructions matter more than what someone learned on a previous roof. That applies to professionals as much as homeowners. It is one reason ongoing manufacturer training is worth asking a contractor about. Always work from the instructions for the exact product you are installing.
They are usually printed directly on the shingle bundle wrapper. The full version is published on the manufacturer's website organized by product line. That is really the first thing to read if you are considering any work involving shingles and fasteners. It costs nothing, takes very little time. Tells you exactly what your warranty coverage is conditioned on.
We're here to see what's going on with your roof. A real assessment starts with your history and your attic, not a number from the driveway. You'll get a straight answer about what's up there, what it needs, and what it costs. Sometimes the honest answer is: your roof looks great.