Roof replacement
Roof Replacement Across Southwestern Ontario
Same house, same budget, different town — and genuinely a different roof. The snow load triples between the two ends of this corridor.
Almost nobody replaces a roof because it turned twenty. They replace it because of the second leak, or because an insurer asked a pointed question at renewal, or because they finally looked in the eavestrough and found it full of granules.
Whatever brought you here, the useful question is not which shingle. It is what your roof actually has to survive — and that changes a surprising amount over a ninety-minute drive.
Ask us your town before you ask us a price
Environment Canada puts Chatham at around 79 cm of snow a year. Stratford gets about 218. Same province, same trade, nearly three times the load — and inland of Goderich the nearest reporting stations run higher again.
Up at the snowbelt end, snow sits on a roof for weeks. That is what builds an ice dam, and a dam pushes water backwards under shingles that were only ever designed to shed it downhill. So the money goes into membrane coverage, honest soffit-to-ridge ventilation, and getting the eave detail right.
Down on the Erie shore, snow rarely stays long enough to matter. Wind does. That money goes into uplift rating, nailing pattern and starter course instead.
Neither spec is better. They are answers to different questions, and a quote written for one and used in the other is quietly under-built in a way you will not find out about for years.
What you are actually buying
A tear-off down to the deck. An honest look at the sheathing with the bad sheets replaced. Ice-and-water membrane at the eaves and up the valleys. Underlayment across the field. New flashing at every chimney, vent and wall junction. Then shingles.
That last-but-one item is where cheap quotes get cheap. Old flashing can be left in place and new shingles laid around it, and it saves a few hundred dollars, and it puts twenty-five-year-old metal under a brand new roof. Ask any roofer outright whether the flashing is being replaced. It is one line, and it matters more than the brand on the bundle.
On going over the old shingles
You can. It is cheaper on the day. It also adds weight in the half of this corridor that already carries the most snow, and it hides the deck — the one part of a roof nobody can assess without pulling the old layer off.
Sound deck, low snow load, tight budget? Defensible. In the snowbelt, rarely.
Talk to a Woodstock roofing contractor
Three things get us most of the way there: which town you are in, roughly when the roof was last done, and what you are actually seeing — a stain on a ceiling, granules in the eavestrough, shingles on the lawn on Sunday morning. That is usually enough to tell you whether this is a repair, a claim, or a roof that has quietly reached the end, without anybody driving anywhere.