DIY Roofing Projects – Why you shouldn’t attempt DIY

Safety Issues With DIY Roofing

The safety of you and anyone else who lives in your home is the number one reason not to attempt any DIY roofing projects. Any roofing work is dangerous and tedious, and you will be surprised how difficult it actually is. Not only will you have to get up on a ladder, but you will also have to haul heavy tools and materials up and down the ladder and then work in the hot sun for hours. All the while, you will need to maintain your balance on the inclined roof and try to avoid any slips or falls. If you’re not trained in roofing, it is best to leave the dangerous work to the professionals who have actual safety equipment, permits and insurance if anything goes wrong.

Knowledge – Professional Roofers Vs DIY

How much do you really know about roofing? Watching a video on the Internet can’t replace years of experience in the field. Proper repair of a roof is vital, as improper solutions can cause further damage to your roof that cannot be repaired. Roofing professionals are specifically trained to know the root cause of damage on a roof and the correct way to handle it.

Quite often, as with most trades, there are skills learnt and clever rules of thumb to follow that ensure a good result. DIY Roofing can lead to not only a visually bad result, but also a technically incorrect finish. The nuance of water flow, understanding watercourses, knowing about paint curing times (which vary from brand to brand) in different climate types, thickness of coatings, type of roof screws, correct type of materials and profiles of roof sheets, penetrations, Dektites and sealants etc – there is a long list of considerations that only experienced trades people understand.

Get this stuff wrong and your roof could leak, and you could be making problems even worse and more expensive for a professional to fix later.

Warranties

Most roofing work and products come with a warranty that will be voided by anyone other than a qualified roofing professional working on the roof. So if your roof is still covered under a warranty from when it was installed or last restored, getting up there to attempt to do any work yourself will void that warranty which can lead to a number of problems. MHI Roofing offers a 10 year warranty on its work.

Time and cost-effectiveness

A roofing professional will be able to complete any work in a much shorter time than you could. Time is money and it is just not worth it. You might also think that you will be saving money by working on your roof yourself, and it is true that you will pay a higher up-front cost when hiring a professional. But the reality is that while it may cost you more money in the short-term, it will almost certainly save you money in the long-term. The likelihood that doing work on your own roof will lead to it needing further work and ultimately hiring a professional is very high. Not to mention that your work will obviously have no warranty on it, so you are likely to have recurring issues that will require more money to be put into them.