I cannot recommend Skyward Roofing.
We contracted for a complicated job last winter, involving the replacement of the roof, rebuilding the chimney and restoring the dormers on a landmarked townhouse in NYC.
The job was complicated due to having so many components, but Robert assured me he could handle it. Their bid was similar to others, but I felt at the time that the comprehensiveness of their scope of work justified the choice.
On the plus side, his workers were fast and did a thorough job removing the many layers of the old roof. The mason he hired to replace the chimney also did a good job, using old bricks to replicate the look of the original chimney.
The problem was Skyward's workers: a fast and eager bunch of Ecuadorans who may be good at standard-issue NYC roofing but were definitely not equipped to deal with an old building.
The first problem came up with the dormers. I had asked Skyward to uncover the aluminum cladding so we could see what shape they were in. To my surprise, they were largely intact, and I asked Robert to hold off on working on the dormers while I consulted with Landmarks to determine how to best proceed. Two days later I was horrified to find that the crew had demolished the 200 year old carpentry and started to nail plywood over the framing. Robert was apologetic, but blamed it on "miscommunication".
Unfortunately, "fast and loose" was how things proceeded from there. The crew cut holes for new skylights, but didn't bother to center them between the joists, which are exposed in the interior. I guess it was easier to just build a frame against one joist, resulting in all the skylights being off-center. The frames were often not level with the roofline, just slapped in fast, meaning that the interior finish carpenters had to trim or even rebuild the 2x6s from the inside to get a level surface for the trim. There were further problems with the workers cutting corners and not following the drawings for the rebuilt dormers.
I could overlook all of this if not for the big problem: the roofing tiles were incorrectly installed.
I'd ordered composite shingles, plastic shingles designed to look like wood shakes, similar to the composite slate shingles historic houses often use.
The installation guide specified a minimum 3/16" gap between shingles, recommended 3/8" to allow for expansion in hot weather. The warranty would be voided if the installation wasn't correct. These instructions were even cast into the underside of the shingles themselves, in English and Spanish! Nevertheless Skyward's crew butted each shingle up tightly against the next. This was in the winter when it was cold, so one can imagine what happened when the weather turned hot: the shingles expanded and started to curl and buckle. A lot. By early June there was over a 1" gap buckling between rows in various parts of the roof, plenty of room for rain to run onto the sheathing beneath the shingles.
Robert always said that if there was a problem, they'd be there to fix it. The first night after they'd initially finished we had a hard rain and water streamed into the house in 2 places. The next day Skyward showed up to work on the roof, saying that the underlayment hadn't been properly sealed. This happened in a 3rd spot later in the month, which didn't give me a great deal of confidence in their work.
By June, large sections of the roof tiles were seriously buckling in the heat. I determined that the shingles had been improperly installed. I could clearly see from my dormers that each shingle was tightly set against the next. A contractor friend verified that this was the case throughout the entire roof.
As usual Robert was quick to show up to "correct" the problem: a single worker was going to take out and reinstall only in the areas that had buckled. I told him that wasn't good enough, as all the shingles had been improperly installed. If they weren't buckling now, they'd certainly buckle later. I asked him to remove them all and reinstall them according the manufacturer's instructions.
"I'm not doing that" was his response. I told him in that case, to leave.
I then hired an experienced general contractor who removed all the shingles and reinstalled them properly, replacing the ones that were too warped to flatten out. This was costly, around $14,000 plus $12,000 for the cost of reinstalling the scaffolding.
As I said, Skyward's workers were very fast, which could work out for some jobs that are very routine. But in my case it meant one bad decision after another without consulting me, in order to get the job done as rapidly as possible. Most crucially this was a disaster in not paying attention to the installation instructions, resulting in work that had to be completely redone, at my expense. read more