Roof repair, moss strip, gutter leaf guards
The company owner was "just driving by" and saw that my shop/garage metal roof was showing some rust. I took his card, and said I'd get back to him. Before I could check the company out, he and his crew were back a few days later. He extolled the virtues of his roof coating to "make it like new" and would be guaranteed for 7 years. I repeated that what I needed was a fix on some leakage, and he assured me that this product would take care of that.
He's send his boys up on the roof to patch and drive in any loose nails or screws, then coat it. For $650. I said what I really wanted was to fix the roof over the horse stalls. And the RV roof.
Oh, they could add those in for another $250.
So I finally said OK. These are big men and I'm a smaller woman, and I found them intimidating.
I turned down another $300 worth of stall roof rubbery product repair, despite quite a bit of pressure.
Then they said that they noticed that I had a lot of moss on my house roof, and they could fix that. They "just happened to have" some zinc moss strip. They'd do it for the cost of the materials, since they were here already. I understood it to be 85 cents per foot. The owner later insisted that they had quoted $8.50 per foot, and that I had ok'd the south sunny side of the roof (with no moss, why would I?) as well as the north.
While that was being started, "Oh, you have debris in your gutters, and we can put in a gutter guard for the same price as the zinc strip." The brother showed me the mesh, and so I agreed, thinking that is was the 85 cent/foot price. Although I originally agreed to have only the north side done, they insisted that I needed the south side (without trees) done too. At this point, I just wanted to get rid of them, so caved in.
They made much of the face that the government was offering the rebate for home repairs, and kept mentioning the $1350 (which is the maximum!) as if it was mine already. The brother was telling me about the number of "houses" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) they had painted that year, indicating that they could do the same for me if I wanted my workshop painted.
The owner insisted on coming into my house (which made me very uncomfortable) to write up the bill, which he didn't give to me. All I got was a demand for the $2750. There had been no written estimate, and now there was no invoice, just a receipt for my cheque. He also wanted me to go with him to my bank to get the money, and gave me some cock and bull story about his bank in Alberta taking a month to clear a cheque.
When I finally figured out what I had been charged, as opposed to what I had been expecting to pay, I said that there had been a mistake. And that I had never authorized the zinc strip on the south side of the roof.
Basically he said Tough! It's there now!, and that was that.
Just to rub salt in it, less than a week later, it rained, and the stall roof leaked in the usual places.
Did I mention that the son who worked on the roof partially sprayed my black weather vane, oversprayed onto 6 strings of Christmas lights along the front of the shop, and oversprayed the solar panel on the roof of the RV!!!
- Approximate cost of services:
- $2,750.00