Case Study: A Taradale Hail Roof Replacement

We do not sell roofs, we do not knock on doors after a storm, and if a roof is genuinely the only thing on your list, a dedicated roofer is the right call and we will tell you that on the phone.

What we do is renovations, and a roof turns up inside a lot of them. Sometimes it is the reason the whole project starts, which is what happened here. Sometimes it is what you find once somebody finally gets up there with a ladder and a proper look. Either way it lands on our schedule, and it gets run by the same project lead running everything else on the job, using the same licensed trade partners we have worked with for years.

Hail is the reason this one existed. Calgary gets hit, the roof stops being a maintenance item and becomes the project, and the owners have to decide what goes back on. This page is that decision and the work that followed it, filmed from the air.

Most roofing pages show you a finished roof and ask you to imagine the rest. This one was filmed by drone across the whole replacement, so you can watch the old asphalt come off, the bare decking appear, and the rubber slate go back down course by course. There is no voiceover and nothing to listen to. It is just the job.

Thinking about something like this? Call (403) 465-2288 and talk it through with the team that would run it.

Every photograph on this page is a frame from that film. Nothing here is a stock photo, and nothing here is another company's job.

There is a faster way to do a roof and we did not take it. In the film you can watch the roof turn orange, which is the OSB decking underneath seeing daylight for the first time since the house was built.

Stripping to bare deck costs more in labour and more in disposal. It is also the only version of this job where anybody actually looks at what they are nailing into. Sheathing that has been quietly wet for a decade does not announce itself through two layers of shingle, and a roof is a bad place to find out you guessed wrong.

The other thing the film shows, and the reason we are glad it is on the site, is how the crew is tied off. Every worker on that roof is in a fall arrest harness with the lanyard anchored to the decking. Nobody is walking a two storey hip in runners. That is not a marketing decision, it is the rule on our jobs, and drone footage is a hard place to fake it.

The owners had already been hit once. Putting back the same asphalt shingle would have been cheaper and would have reset the clock to zero, which is a real option and plenty of people take it.

They chose EuroShield instead. It is a rubber slate made from recycled tire rubber by G.E.M. Inc. in southeast Calgary, and the manufacturer rates it Class 4 for impact under UL 2218, the top of that scale. We did not put it forward because it is unusual. We put it forward because the house had already told us what the weather does there.

Up close, the texture is the product: each tile is moulded with a riven slate face, so from the sidewalk it reads as slate rather than as a rubber substitute. From the air you can see the courses run dead straight across a roof that changes plane four times.

Those product claims are the manufacturer's and we state them as theirs. Our own promise on any job we run is The Suite Guarantee, which covers our workmanship and is a separate thing from a material warranty.