;

Some may recognize this picture I shared about a month ago.  This is a failure of the roofing structure, the trusses are separating and I strongly advised consulting with a Licensed Engineer before my clients make their final offer.

Tile roofs are up to 9 times heavier than conventional asphalt roofs.

I got a call back for a re-inspect of other issues that were fixed on the home.  The roof framing was NOT repaired, but they did take my advice and contacted an engineer.  The original estimate for repairs of the roof alone was $70,000!  No that is not a typo, seventy thousand dollars!

Spanish Tile

The problem with the home was the cement tile roof that someone decided to put on conventional framing.  I have seen this kind of damage before.  Before any cement or tile roof is to be installed, careful calculations must be performed to assure the home’s structure can handle the extreme loads.

The entire building must be constructed to carry the extra loads of a masonry roof or structural failure is nearly inevitable

In another part of this home, there were sloping floors where a bathroom was cantilevered off the side of the structure.  In this kind of construction, the floor framing has no beam on the end to carry the load.  I bet when the home was designed, they had planned on a simple asphalt shingle roof, but when they added thousands of pounds of concrete tiles the roof structure failed, and that bathroom having the same concrete roof is now shifted a couple of inches downhill.

So in conclusion, a bad roofing decision has cost 70K to repair the roof, and to totally rebuild that end of the home to fix the bathroom sloping could be 50k to 100k.

Never hire inexperienced roofers, they can cost you a lot of money!

Just for fun, here is a Spanish tile roof full of bats, this looks like the job from hell.

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JJ Greive

JJ & Suzanne are both licensed, highly skilled inspectors and educators. We are the authors of our class curriculum, and truly enjoy sharing this with our students

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