When your roofer disappears mid-project

It usually starts with a quiet Tuesday. The crew was there Thursday, half the shingles are off, there is underlayment stapled down over the front slope and a pile of tear-off in the driveway. Nobody showed Friday. The texts get one-word answers, then none. The number rings out.

We get called into these two or three times a season, most often in Simcoe County and the townships north of it, and almost always by somebody who has spent a week being polite and is now watching the forecast. Here is the order we would do things in, and what actually matters.

First 24 hours: make the building watertight

Before the contract question, before the lawyer question, get water off your roof boards. Everything else can be argued about later. Water in the assembly for a week turns a roofing dispute into an insulation, drywall and mould claim, and in a bad case a framing one.

If the roof is opened up and weather is coming, hire someone to tarp it today. Any roofer will do a proper tarp as a paid call out, and a tarp done properly is not a blue sheet with bricks on it. It runs up over the ridge, it is battened at the top edge so water cannot run under, and it laps the way shingles lap. Pay for it, keep the invoice, and photograph the roof before and after.

If there is loose material up there, panels, bundles, a stack of trim, get it down or secured. A sheet of steel leaving a roof in a November gust is somebody else’s windshield, and the liability question after that gets unpleasant.

Two things not to do. Do not climb up yourself to assess it, especially on anything partly covered in metal or wet underlayment, which is far slicker than it looks. And do not let anyone strip more off to “see what is going on” until you have decided who is finishing the job.

Work out whether they are gone or just badly run

Not every disappearance is abandonment. Roofing in Ontario runs on weather and on supply, and there are ordinary reasons a crew vanishes for a stretch:

• The panel or shingle order was short or arrived damaged, and the replacement is three weeks out.
• A crew member got hurt and the company is short-handed.
• They pulled the crew to an emergency leak call and did not tell you.
• They overbooked the fall and are robbing your job to cover a worse one.

The last is bad project management, not fraud, and it usually ends with the job finished. What separates it from real abandonment is communication. A contractor who is behind will tell you a date, even a bad one. A contractor who is gone stops answering.

The test we would apply: one clear written message, one phone call, and a deadline. If you get nothing in writing back within a few business days, treat it as abandonment and start moving. Waiting three more weeks out of politeness has cost people an entire roof season.

Write everything down, today

This is the step people skip and regret. Whatever happens next, a demand letter, an insurance claim, Small Claims Court, an argument with a supplier, runs on the record you build now.

Put together, in one place:

• The signed contract or quote, and every revision.
• Every payment: amount, date, method, and what it was described as. Cheque images and e-transfer confirmations both count.
• A dated photo set of the roof as it stands, from the ground on all four elevations, plus anything visible from an upstairs window.
• Screenshots of every text and email thread, including the ones where they promised dates.
• A simple log: date, what was agreed, what happened.

Write down the material left on site as well, and do not let it walk. Panel, trim, fasteners and underlayment sitting in your driveway may have been paid for out of your deposit, and it may also still belong to a supplier who has not been paid. Photograph it, leave it where it is, and note it.

What Ontario actually gives you

We are roofers, not lawyers, and anything with real money in it deserves half an hour with one. But here is the shape of it, so you are not going in cold.

Your contract is the main event. Ontario consumer protection legislation requires a written contract for most home renovation work over a modest threshold, with the work, the price, and the dates set out. If you signed at your kitchen table rather than at their office, that is a direct agreement, and it carries a cooling off period and stricter content requirements. A contract missing required terms is not automatically unenforceable, but it materially improves your position. Missing dates, a vague scope and a verbal price are the contractor’s problem as much as yours.

Unfinished work is a breach. You are generally entitled to what it costs you to finish the job properly, minus what you still owed under the original contract. If you paid a deposit and the deposit exceeds the value of what was actually done, the difference is what you are chasing.

Small Claims Court handles claims up to $35,000 in Ontario and is designed to be used without a lawyer. Most residential roofing disputes land under that ceiling. A judgment is not money in hand, a contractor who abandoned your job may well have nothing to collect, but it is the usual path.

The Construction Act cuts both ways. Their suppliers and subcontractors can register a lien against your property for materials and labour supplied to it, even if you already paid the contractor. That is the part homeowners find hardest to accept and it is real. Lien deadlines are short, counted in weeks from last supply, which is exactly why you want to know now whether the supplier was paid rather than finding out in the spring.

Call the supplier directly. If you know the yard the material came from, and it is usually on the delivery slip in your driveway, a polite call asking whether the account is current tells you a great deal, quickly.

If you paid by credit card, call the issuer now. Services not rendered is a chargeback category, and the window is measured from the transaction date, not from when you gave up hope.

Two other quick checks worth making: whether their WSIB clearance was valid, which anyone can verify, and whether their liability insurance was real. If someone was working on your roof uninsured, that is your exposure too.

Getting the roof finished

Expect the second contractor to price this differently, and understand why before you take offence at it.

Taking over an unfinished roof means owning a stranger’s work. Nobody can warrant what is under roof boards they did not open, or flashing they did not set. A careful company will want to strip back to something it can stand behind, will not simply carry on from where the last crew stopped, and will say so in writing. That is not opportunism, it is the only honest way to warranty the result.

What a taking over quote should contain:

• Exactly how far back they intend to strip, and why.
• What happens if the roof boards underneath are damaged, priced per sheet, so a surprise does not become a renegotiation.
• Who owns and who disposes of the material on site.
• A written warranty on their own work, with the scope of it stated plainly.

Have them document the condition on arrival with photographs. If you end up in court, an independent professional’s record of what was actually done is worth more than your own. Our article on what a roof inspection report actually tells you covers what that document should contain.

One honest note on cost. A rescued job frequently comes in higher than the original quote, and sometimes close to what the whole roof would have cost from the start. The money that went out the door with the first contractor is usually gone, at least for now. Pricing the finish work as though that deposit still exists is how people end up with two unfinished roofs.

How to not be here twice

Most of these jobs were sold at a price that could not have been delivered. If one quote is dramatically below the others, that is a schedule risk and a finishing risk, not a bargain.

The structural protections are boring and they work:

• Keep the deposit small. Material deposits are legitimate. Half the contract price up front is not. Staged payments tied to completed milestones, deposit, tear off complete, dry in complete, final, keep the incentive pointed forward.
• Hold back the final payment until the job is genuinely finished, including cleanup, flashing, trims and the paperwork. The Construction Act contemplates a holdback for good reason.
• Get the scope in writing, with the specific product, gauge, finish and underlayment named, not “metal roof” on a single line.
• Verify insurance and WSIB before the first payment, not after.
• Prefer companies with a fixed address and a long local record. Our twelve questions for choosing a metal roofing contractor is the version of this list we hand people before they sign with anybody, including us.

And be careful with a deal that only works for cash. No paper means no contract, no warranty and no leverage, and it is the single most common feature of the jobs we get called in to rescue.

If you are looking at half a roof right now

Deal with the water first, write everything down second, and get a real quote for the finish work third. If the original scope was a metal roof, it is worth pricing the complete job properly rather than patching a compromised start, and our cost guide for standing seam in Ontario explains what should be in that number.

We work across Barrie, Simcoe County, Orillia, Collingwood and the Blue Mountains, Muskoka, Grey Bruce, the Kawarthas and down into York Region, and we do take over abandoned jobs when we can stand behind the result. If we cannot, we will tell you that too, and say what we would do instead.

Call 705-816-5282 or get in touch and we will come and look at it. You can also see what we do across Barrie and Simcoe County or on our services page.