What a roof replacement costs in Parksville

A roof quote is a measurement problem. Two houses with the same footprint can differ by half again in roof area once slope is accounted for, and a steep roof costs more per square foot to work on than a shallow one because everything slows down — staging, fall protection, material handling.

Then there is what is underneath. A roof carrying one layer strips faster and disposes cheaper than one carrying three. A deck with soft sheathing at the valleys adds material and hours that cannot be seen from the ground. A roof with six penetrations, two skylights and a chimney is mostly flashing work, and flashing work is where a roofer's time actually goes.

Access is the last of it. A two-storey with a hedge tight to the wall and no driveway takes longer to load, strip and clean than a rancher with a flat gravel pad beside the eave.

Roof area, measured on the slope. Not the floor plan, not the footprint. Slope adds area, and it gets measured on the roof rather than calculated from the outside.

Number of existing layers. Each one adds tear-off labour and disposal weight, and the second layer is where the deck condition stops being knowable in advance.

Deck condition. Sound sheathing costs nothing extra. Split, delaminated or rotted sheathing is priced per sheet, and the quantity is honestly unknown until the covering is off.

Complexity. Valleys, hips, dormers, skylights, chimneys, stacks and roof-to-wall junctions. A simple gable and a cut-up roof of the same area are different jobs.

Covering choice. The published spread between asphalt and slate is roughly tenfold, and metal sits between them with a wide range of its own depending on whether the panel is through-fastened or standing seam.

Access and site. Storey height, driveway, landscaping, distance to the dump and whether a bin can sit where the work is.

The table below reproduces two published sources with their dates rather than blending them into one number, because they disagree — which is itself worth knowing.

Green Building Canada publishes province-wide ranges and notes that rates in and around Victoria and Vancouver run about 15 to 20 per cent above the rest of British Columbia. RenoCalc publishes a narrower, more recent Vancouver figure. Neither is a quote, neither is Island-specific, and neither accounts for the condition of any particular deck.

Read them as a sanity check on a quote, not as a target. A quote well under the bottom of a published range usually has something excluded, and the exclusions are where to look.

Two totals are not comparable. Two scopes are. A quote worth setting beside another one names the covering product and grade, the underlay, where eave and valley protection is placed and how far it runs, the ventilation target and how it is achieved, every flashing detail by location, what happens to the old material, what deck repair is included and at what rate beyond it, and what is explicitly excluded.

Ventilation is the line most often missing. BC Building Code 9.19.1.2 sets unobstructed vent area at not less than 1/300 of the insulated ceiling area, rising to 1/150 below a 1-in-6 slope, distributed with at least 25 per cent high and 25 per cent low. A quote that does not say how it reaches that figure has not priced it.

Deck repair is the line most often used to make a total look smaller. A rate per sheet, stated up front, is the honest way to handle work nobody can quantify before tear-off.

The second table breaks a standard shingle re-roof into its components. The proportions are the useful part: material is under half of it, and tear-off, disposal and labour together account for more than the shingles do.

That is why a second layer, a difficult site or a rotted deck moves a total so much more than upgrading the shingle does — and why the cheapest quote in a stack is often the one that assumed the deck was fine.