The Crew on the Roof

We take moss off roofs. It is a narrow trade and we would rather do it properly than add four more things we would only do adequately. What the job protects is the covering — the shakes, shingles or tiles that are standing between the weather and everything underneath.

It is not difficult work. It is careful work, and the difference between careful and quick does not show up on the day. It shows up in how the roof is wearing five years later.

The covering decides the job, not the postcode

A cedar shake roof in Brentwood Bay is a different week from a concrete tile roof in Broadmead, and both are different again from a tall asphalt roof in Langford. Cedar holds growth in the keyways and softens with age. Asphalt carries a granule surface that pressure takes off. Tile is fine to clean and easy to crack underfoot.

So the method follows the covering rather than a standard approach applied to every roof we are sent to. That is most of what a decade on these roofs actually teaches you.

Why this happens here

Shade and rain, in that order. Saanich carries more mature tree cover than almost any municipality on the south Island, and a great many roofs sit under something that was planted when the house was new. Add a wet stretch running from October to March and a north slope simply never dries out.

Arbutus makes it worse in the north of the peninsula because it sheds all year and never gives a roof a clear run. Fir and cedar drop needles that mat down and hold moisture at the surface. None of that is anybody’s fault, and none of it is fixed by being tidier.

You will hear what we found up there

Clearing the growth is the job. But standing on a roof shows you a great deal that is invisible from the lawn — granules worn thin exactly where a mat had been sitting, shake butts gone soft, a valley still damp on a dry afternoon, a flashing joint starting to open.

You will hear about it. That is not a lead-in to a sales pitch, and most of what we find is not ours to fix. It is so the decision is yours rather than a surprise in February.

How we work out a price

There is no single figure for a roof, because there is no single roof. What moves it is the covering, the pitch, the height, how many planes and valleys there are, how far the growth has spread, and how we get a ladder to the far side.

That last one catches people out on sloped lots around Mount Tolmie and up above the water in Brentwood Bay, where the ground a ladder needs is not always where you would want it. It is worth knowing before we quote rather than after we arrive, which is why a photo of the side of the house is more useful than a square footage.

Send the address and we will come back with a free estimate. You will have the figure before anything is booked.

And when the answer is no

Sometimes a roof is far enough through its life that clearing it makes it look better without making it last longer. Sometimes the real problem is a limb over the north slope, and dealing with that would do more than anything we could apply.

We say so in both cases. We are insured, WCB-registered and we stand behind the work — and turning down a job we do not think is worth your money is part of the same idea.