Pricing rotten decking before the tear-off

The moment this is about

The tear-off is half done. The crew has found soft decking over the back half of the main roof, the homeowner is standing in the drive, and there was never a price for it in writing. Whatever you say next is a negotiation, held with the roof open and the homeowner watching.

That is the first of the five ways our roofing contract says a roofing job goes wrong, and it is the one that costs the most goodwill. The fix is not a better conversation on the day. It is a number both of you agreed to weeks earlier, before anyone could see the deck.

This guide walks through how to set that number up, using the pages of our own Roofing Contract & Estimate. None of it depends on which state you work in, and where your state does decide something, we say so.

Why decking cannot go in the total

Nobody can see the deck until the old roof is off. You can walk it, look at it from a ladder or fly a drone over it, and you will still be guessing about what is under two layers of shingles. A lump sum that includes an unknown amount of replacement deck is either padded or wrong, and the homeowner suspects both.

So the contract treats decking the way it treats anything hidden: as a unit price agreed in advance, applied to a quantity counted on the day. The document puts it in one line — unit prices agreed in advance are the difference between an extra and an argument.

Start at the inspection, with a camera in your hand

Before anybody prices anything, write down the existing roof as you found it. This is Section 3 of the contract, and its whole job is to make the later conversation about rotten decking a conversation rather than an argument.

Record the date, who inspected, and whether the roof was walked or viewed from a ladder or a drone. Then go down the findings with a photograph reference against each one. The lines that matter most for decking are these:

• Number of existing layers found
• Deck material and thickness
• Deck condition where visible
• Rot, delamination or soft spots
• Previous repairs or patches
• Signs of previous leaks inside
• Structural sag or deflection

Soft spots you can feel underfoot, a stained ceiling in a back bedroom, an old patch near the chimney: each of those, written and photographed on the day you inspect, is the evidence that the homeowner was told before the price was agreed. It also tells you where to expect the unit price to be used.

Break the roof into sections

A roof is not one surface and should not be priced as one. Section 4 of the contract breaks the job into the sections a crew actually works — main, garage, porch, dormers, additions, low-slope areas — with the area, the pitch, the work and the covering for each.

Section 6.1 then prices each roof section separately, with labour, materials and disposal on their own lines. The contract's reasoning is simple: a homeowner who can see which section costs what almost never argues about the total. It also means that when decking turns up bad on the garage and fine on the main roof, both of you can see exactly where the extra belongs.

The unit-price table

Section 6.2 is the page this guide is really about: unit prices for what is found after tear-off. Every row has five columns.

• Item — what the price is for, such as replacement decking
• Unit — how it is counted, in whatever unit you bill
• Unit price — the figure you and the homeowner agree now
• Included allowance — any quantity already inside the base price
• How it is verified — how the quantity is checked before it is billed

The last column is the one most estimates skip, and it is the one that settles the argument. A unit price is only as good as the count it is multiplied by. Write down, before the job, how that count will be made and shown.

Under the table the contract carries three more lines that belong to decking and nothing else: how deck replacement is measured and billed, the photograph and count required before extra deck is billed, and who must approve extra work, and how. Fill all three. The last one matters most when the homeowner is at work and the roof is open: decide now whether a phone call counts, or a text with a photograph, or only a signature.

The estimate also records what could change the total and how long the estimate is valid. Name decking in the first of those lines, in plain words, so the homeowner reads it before they sign.

On the day: the change order

When the deck comes up bad, the unit price has already done the hard part. What is left is recording it. Section 11 of the contract is a change order that asks for the facts in order: who requested it and why, which roof section is affected, the work added, the quantity and how it was counted, a photograph reference, the unit price applied from Section 6.2, the effect on the price, the new contract total, the effect on the completion date, and whether a permit revision or an extra inspection is needed.

Both of you sign it before the work, and a log beside it keeps the running total, so the contract price is always one glance away. The contract quotes one state's licensing board on why: once a change order is signed, it becomes part of the written contract.

Photograph the bad deck before it is covered. The count you wrote on the change order should match what the photographs show, because that is the verification you promised in Section 6.2.

At the end: check what was billed

The final walkthrough in Section 12 has 22 items, walked with the homeowner standing next to you rather than signed over the phone. One of them is written for exactly this job: deck replacement areas match what was billed. Every line gets a tick or a note, and the note becomes the punch list.

If you did the inspection, the section pricing, the unit-price table and the change order, that line takes a minute. If you did not, it is where the argument you avoided on the day comes back.

What your state and your permit office decide

Some of what surrounds a decking decision is not yours or the homeowner's to agree. How many layers may stay before a full tear-off is required, and what the local code says about ice barrier and wind, are set by the authority over the job address. The contract's Section 1.2 asks you to ring the permit office for each job and write down what they said.

Deposit limits, cancellation rights and lien notices are state law, and the contract leaves every one of those figures blank for you to fill from your own licensing board. It also carries no insurance-claim wording at all: several states regulate what a roofer may say or do about a homeowner's claim, so if the decking is part of a claim, that wording comes from your own lawyer. The contract's own advice is to have a construction lawyer in your state read the finished contract once before you use it.

Where to find these pages

Everything above is laid out, in this order, in our Roofing Contract & Estimate: the as-found inspection (Section 3), the scope and estimate by roof section (Sections 4 and 6.1), the unit-price table (Section 6.2), the change order and log (Section 11) and the final walkthrough (Section 12). It is a fill-in PDF you type into, and when a source it relies on changes, the updated version lands in your account at no charge.