Do the roof first. That is the whole argument, and it matters most for the homeowner who has already signed for new siding and windows and quietly pushed the roof into a later phase. A tear-off is demolition work carried out above everything else on the house, and gravity has no opinion about how new the trim is. Shingles come down in wheelbarrow loads, nails land where they land, and a crew has to set ladders and staging against something. Which is why the people who call local roofing contractors selden ny after the panels are already hung tend to open with a question about protecting them. They usually can be protected, mostly, at the cost of time and care that the earlier schedule would have handed you for free.
Order Of Work Decides What Gets Damaged
Sequence is a budget decision wearing a scheduling decision’s clothes. Put the roof last and you are paying two crews to work in the same three feet of air, one of them dropping debris onto the other’s finished product. Put it first and the siding installer shows up to a dry house with clean fascia to flash against. Timing is not entirely yours to choose, either. In an April 2026 release, the National Roofing Contractors Association reported that 40% of reroofing contractors were carrying a backlog of one to two months, while 26% reported no backlog at all and 21% were booked three to four months out. A twenty-two year old roof on a 1990s colonial does not need to wait behind the siding order. It needs to be in somebody’s queue before that queue fills.
The Checklist Before Any Exterior Trade Books
Before any trade takes a deposit, walk the house once with a notepad and settle a short list. Start with the decking, because it is the one line item nobody can price from the driveway. Plywood that has been wet under a valley for a decade only announces itself once the shingles are off, and the change order arrives mid-job, at the exact moment you have the least leverage. Ask for a per-sheet price in writing at signing. Say the estimate carries four sheets at a stated rate and the crew uncovers eleven; you want that arithmetic to be boring, not a phone call.
Second, ventilation. A ridge vent cut during a tear-off costs a fraction of what the same work costs as its own separate trip, and any insulation going into that attic later will underperform without it. Third, the gutters and the drip edge, which form the actual seam between the roof and whatever siding goes on next; whoever hangs them second inherits the other trade’s tolerances and has to live inside them. Fourth, the staging plan. Where the dumpster sits, which garden beds get covered, whether the new windows on the south elevation are getting plywood over them for two days. Fifth, dates, and this is the one people skip. Get the roof’s start window on paper before the siding deposit clears, because a deposit is what converts a flexible calendar into a fixed one, and every trade booked after that point is negotiating against a date they cannot move.
Ratings And Reflectance Translated Into Plain Terms
Shingle color usually gets chosen off a sample board in a driveway, which is an odd way to pick a surface that will sit in full sun for twenty summers. The term you will hear is solar reflectance, meaning the share of sunlight the surface sends back instead of soaking up. A lighter, more reflective shingle runs a cooler attic underneath it. A dark architectural shingle on a shaded north-facing colonial barely registers the difference. What we see most often is a homeowner matching the roof to the new siding color and never asking what is happening under the deck. Ask about the ventilation and insulation package in the same conversation, because reflectance does very little for a roof sitting over a sealed, stagnant attic.
See also: How Strategic Protection Ensures Growth and Stability in Fitness Businesses
Sequencing Saves More Than It Costs
None of this makes the roof cheaper. It makes the other two contracts safer. The roof is the only exterior trade whose schedule can undo every other trade’s work. Search local roofing contractors selden ny and you will get a list of names, but what you actually need out of that list is a date, early enough that the siding and window crews are working under a finished roof rather than around a future one. Book the tear-off, then let the rest of the spring calendar settle in behind it.
