Replacing a roof on the coast

Where the money actually goes

A quote for a coastal tear off has four parts and only one of them is the shingle. There is the tear off and disposal, which is priced by how many layers come off and how far the truck has to go. There is the decking, which nobody can price honestly until the old roof is off, because salt air and decades of small leaks do things to plywood that you cannot see from above. There is the dry in and the edge detail, which is where wind performance is won or lost. And there is the shingle or panel itself.

Ask for those four broken out. A single number tells you nothing, and it makes the decking conversation into an argument halfway through the job instead of a line on a page before it starts. A good contract says what a sheet of replacement decking costs and roughly how many are expected.

The certificate

This is the part that surprises people who moved here from inland Texas. Property on this coastal strip is often covered for wind and hail by the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association rather than by the main homeowner policy, and TWIA wants a Certificate of Compliance for improvements to the structure. That certificate is the WPI-8. Since June 2020 it is issued by the Texas Department of Insurance through its own windstorm inspection program, and TDI runs a field office in Corpus Christi alongside the ones up the coast.

The practical point is about sequence. The inspection is checking things that get covered up: the deck, the fastening, the way the edge is finished. That means it has to be arranged before and during the work, not after the last truck leaves. A roof that has gone on with no inspection is not automatically a bad roof, but it is a roof with no paper behind it, and TWIA has said plainly that without a Certificate of Compliance it lacks evidence the structure conforms and the structure may be ineligible.

You can check what has already been issued against an address through the association's own certificate lookup before you buy a house here, which is worth doing.

Timing and weather

Nobody sensible tears a roof off in front of a system coming up the Gulf. The practical window on this coast is narrow in late summer and wide in winter, and a company that is honest about that will tell you they would rather start Tuesday than get half way and dry it in under a tarp on Friday.

If the roof is already leaking and it cannot wait, a proper dry in is a real repair for a short period, not a fudge. What it is not is a reason to skip the wind damage conversation if a storm is what caused the problem in the first place.