Let me say this; I hate talking about roofs. I’ve hated talking about mine in particular for nearly 11 years.

Before we moved into the house my wife said we should have the roof done, so we went with someone the realtor recommended. They didn’t do a good job as it started leaking with the first big rain, and when we asked the realtor about it she said she didn’t know the work they did, but they had a flyer on the wall so she offered their name. We had them back three times over the next couple of years, and things never got done properly.

Enter the next guy, who said he’d repair our roof, only he did other roof work we weren’t expecting. That was a major mess. Then we had roofer #3 who did a wonderful job with the small portion of roof he did for a lot of money. The 4th roofer we had did only a portion as well, got some things stabilized, but that work didn’t last all that long either.

Finally, we found someone we thought we could trust. He’s married to a young lady I consider as family and he talked to me in a manner that helped me better understand where he was coming from; better as in I know nothing about home improvements so he answered my stupid questions as best he could. My wife is much more savvy so he answered her questions to her satisfaction as well.

Completed Work

His name is Eric VanDusen of VanDusen Exteriors, based in Clay NY, and he offered a very nice price to do my roof. As a point of comparison, it was way less than the proposal we had for $30,000; how crazy does that sound? And I had seen some examples of the roof work he’d done around my neighborhood, and he’d also done some businesses whose roofs I’d seen. We had the offer of either going with aluminum or shingles, and we decided to stick with the traditional, going with black.

And talk about working fast. We were told it could take 3 days but they were done in a day and a half. He had 9 guys at one point working on it Monday and 7 guys working on it Tuesday morning to finish up. We got lucky in not having to replace any wood as well. The result looks great, the work comes with a 20-year guarantee, and the shingles come with a 30-year guarantee.

Do I recommend Eric and his guys? For sure; thanks!