You’ll see what’s wrong before you’re asked to pay for it.

Everything above your ceiling works as one thing. The framing carries the load. The deck ties it together. The underlayment does the actual waterproofing — tile is armour, not a seal. Flashings handle every place the roof gets interrupted by something. And underneath all of it, air is supposed to be moving.

Change one and you’ve changed the rest.

Which is why the felt on an eighties tract home in Clovis is finished at twenty-two years when the spec sheet says longer. It isn’t failing from rain. It’s cooking — sun on top, and an attic underneath running 140 degrees in July because there are exhaust vents up high and nothing pulling air in down low. The tile shrugs that off. The felt doesn’t.

Now watch what usually happens next. Somebody strips the roof, lays new felt, puts the tile back, and never looks at the soffits. Same house. Same attic. Same 140 degrees. Twenty years on, you’re standing in the driveway holding the same quote you’re holding now.

So the first question isn’t what goes on top. It’s what’s underneath, and why the last one died when it did.

“We had three different roofing companies visit… Two visited both the attic and the roof and one just looked at the roof. Eduardo visited the roof and attic and discovered issues that the other two did not.”

— Keith Putirka · Google review, Fresno

Sometimes the answer is smaller than you were told. On these tract homes the tile is usually fine — fifty years, some of it will outlive the house — and only what’s under it has failed. Lifting the tile, stacking it, replacing the underlayment and putting the same tile back runs $14,000–$20,000 on a typical 2,000–2,500 sq ft Fresno or Clovis home. A full tear-off with new tile on that same house is $25,000–$40,000, depending on tile type, slope, and how many roof planes you’ve got.

You keep the tile. You save ten to twenty thousand dollars. But only if whoever’s up there fixed the reason the underlayment cooked in the first place — otherwise you’ve bought the same twenty-two years over again.

Ask whoever’s holding the clipboard which job they’re quoting you, and what they intend to do about the attic. If they haven’t been under the tile, they don’t know yet. Here’s what a lift-and-relay actually involves.

Underlayment

Synthetic, and doubled where the situation calls for it rather than where it’s convenient. Where the deck or the detail is already compromised, ice-and-water shield goes down. On flat and low-slope, single-ply membrane with clad metal, heat-welded — welded, not glued, not coated over the top of a problem.

Ventilation

Code compliance, and that means both halves. Intake low, exhaust high. Ridge vents with nothing feeding them from the eave don’t ventilate anything — they just look like ventilation. Getting this right is what keeps the next underlayment from dying early, so it isn’t an upsell, it’s part of the roof.

Flashings and valleys

Twenty-four inch metal in the valleys, and the shingle doubled through it. There’s a faster way to run a valley. We don’t use it. Valleys and flashings are where roofs actually leak, not out in the open field.

The deck

We don’t cover anything up. If there’s dry rot under that tile, you’re going to know about it — on video, before we talk about price. A roof laid over rotten sheathing looks identical to a good one on the day it’s finished.

Fasteners and battens

The crews regulate their gun pressure to the temperature they’re working in, because a nail that’s overdriven or standing proud is a fastener that failed on day one. Elevated battens where the design calls for them. None of this is visible when we leave. It’s still done right.

The corrections nobody quotes for

Does it need a cricket or a saddle behind that chimney? Is water being dumped against a wall instead of into a gutter? Is the overhang missing where it should be throwing water clear of the fascia? Those aren’t extras — they’re the reasons a roof fails early, and they get looked at on every inspection.