Work on your home, by a licensed contractor

What a licence actually covers, and why it matters before you call anyone

I hold two Florida licences: CBC059592, Certified Building Contractor, and CCC1327217, Certified Roofing Contractor. Both are public record. You can type either number into the Florida DBPR licence search and see the status, the name attached, and the expiry date without asking me anything. I would rather you did that than take my word for it, and the same goes for anyone else you are considering.

The two categories are not interchangeable, and the difference is the reason a lot of jobs go wrong. A roofing licence covers the roof system. A building licence covers structure — walls, framing, foundations, additions, the envelope the roof sits on. A great many problems that look like roof problems are actually structural, and a great many that look structural start at the roof. When one person holds both certifications, nobody has to hand the job to a second trade at the point where the two meet, and nobody gets to blame the other one for what happens at the seam.

A licence number is not a quality guarantee and I will not pretend otherwise. It tells you the state has verified competence and insurance for a defined scope of work, and that there is a body you can complain to. It tells you nothing about whether the work will be tidy or whether the person will answer the phone in March. What it does do is give you a floor, and an unlicensed bid has no floor at all — no recourse, no bond, and in Florida, a permit problem that becomes yours rather than theirs.

Ask for the number. Ask for it in writing. If someone will not give it to you, that is your answer.

Construction — additions, garages, pole barns, metal buildings, design and build

This is the work that changes the footprint or the structure of what you own. An addition is the most involved thing most homeowners ever commission: it touches foundation, framing, roof tie-in, electrical, often plumbing, and it always touches the permit office. The tie-in is where additions succeed or fail. A new roof plane meeting an old one is a detail that either gets flashed and sequenced properly or leaks within two seasons, and you will not be able to see which from the ground.

Garages are simpler but not simple. Attached or detached changes the fire separation requirements, the foundation, and sometimes the setback you are allowed. Pole barns and metal buildings are the cheapest square footage you can legally put up in Florida, and they are also where the wind load calculation matters most — a building that is mostly roof and mostly open is the one the wind can get under.

Design and build means the drawings and the construction come from the same place. It is worth asking for when a project has unknowns, because the alternative — a designer who never has to build it and a builder who never had a say — puts every discovered problem into a change order.

Project management is for when you have the trades but nobody holding the sequence. It is a real service and an unglamorous one: knowing that the inspection has to pass before the drywall goes up is worth more than any single trade decision.

Property maintenance and property preservation cover the ongoing and the neglected respectively. Preservation work is usually a property that has been empty — the questions are water intrusion, security, and whether anything has started to rot behind a surface that still looks fine.

Handyman work is the small stuff, and I mention it because the honest answer is sometimes that your job is a handyman job and not a contract job. Being told that is worth something.

Roofing — repair and replacement, and how to tell which one you need

Roof repair and roof replacement are different decisions, and the second is often sold when the first would do. The honest test is not the age on the shingle warranty. It is the condition of the decking, the number and location of failures, and whether the failures share a cause.

Three leaks in three unrelated places on a fifteen-year-old roof usually means the roof is at the end of its service life and repair is money into a system that is going to keep failing. One leak at a penetration, on a roof with sound decking and no granule loss, is a repair — and anyone quoting a full replacement for it should be asked to explain why.

What actually drives the price of a replacement, in rough order of impact: the number of squares, the pitch, the number of layers coming off, the condition of the decking underneath, the number and type of penetrations, and access. Decking is the one nobody can quote honestly from the driveway. It is under the shingles. A contractor who gives you a firm all-in number without looking at the decking is either padding for the worst case or planning to come back to you with a change order, and you will not know which until the tear-off.

Penetrations deserve a specific warning, because the word is used loosely. A pipe boot is a penetration. So is a skylight, and a skylight is roughly fifteen square feet of it. If a quote says "penetrations included" and you have skylights, get that in writing with the skylights named.

On insurance: a roof that failed from a storm and a roof that failed from age are handled completely differently, and the difference is documentation taken at the right time. I am not a public adjuster and I will not handle a claim for you — that is a licensed activity I do not hold. What I can do is document what I find properly, with dates.

Emergency — tarp, water, storm, trees, and what to do in the first hour

Emergency work is different from every other category on this page because the sequence matters more than the craftsmanship. Emergency tarp installation exists to stop the damage getting worse while the real repair is arranged. A tarp is not a repair and should never be sold as one, but a tarp fitted properly on the day beats a perfect roof fitted in three weeks.

Water mitigation is the work of getting water out and drying the structure before it becomes a mould and rot problem. The clock on this is short. Materials that are wet for a long weekend are frequently recoverable; materials wet for a fortnight generally are not, and the cost difference between those two outcomes is large.

Storm mitigation covers the work done to reduce what a storm can do next time — and in Florida the threat is wind, not hail. That distinction changes what is worth doing. Tree removal after a storm is an emergency category for a simple reason: a leaning tree over a structure is a second event waiting to happen.

24-hour emergency services means the phone gets answered outside business hours. It does not mean everything can be solved at 2am, and anyone implying otherwise is selling.

If you are reading this with water coming in: move what you can out of the way, photograph everything before you move it, and put a container under the drip. The photographs taken before anything is touched are worth more later than anything else you will do in that hour.

Inspections — home, roof, four-point, wind mitigation, citizens

Inspections are the cheapest useful thing on this page and the most misunderstood. They serve different masters and they are not substitutes.

A home inspection is for a buyer. It is a broad look at condition, and its value is that it is commissioned by the person with the most to lose. A roof inspection is narrower and deeper, and is what you want when the question is specifically about the roof — before a purchase, after a storm, or when an insurer has asked.

A four-point inspection exists because insurers ask for it, typically on older homes. Four points: roof, electrical, plumbing, HVAC. It is not a condition survey of the house; it is an underwriting document, and it will not tell you about the things your insurer does not price.

A wind mitigation inspection is the one that can pay for itself. It documents the features that make a Florida home more resistant to wind — roof deck attachment, roof-to-wall connections, opening protection, roof geometry — and those features can affect what you are charged. I am not going to quote you a saving, because it depends entirely on your carrier and your home, and anyone quoting a specific figure before looking is guessing.

A Citizens inspection is what Citizens Property Insurance requires. It is a specific form for a specific insurer and it is not interchangeable with the others.

The general rule: if an insurer asked for it, get exactly the one they named. If you asked for it, get the broadest one you can afford.

Renovation — kitchens, baths, remodelling, painting

Renovation is where budgets go wrong, and the reason is almost always the same: what is behind the surface.

A kitchen is the most expensive room per square foot in most houses because it concentrates plumbing, electrical, ventilation, and cabinetry into one space, and because everything is visible when it is finished. A bath is the same problem in miniature with more waterproofing. In both, the honest unknown is what is behind the tile and under the floor. Anyone giving you a fixed price without opening anything up is pricing the risk into the number, and you are paying for that certainty whether or not the problem exists.

General remodelling and home improvement cover the rest — reconfiguring space, replacing failed materials, bringing something dated up to current. The question worth asking before any of it is whether the work is cosmetic or corrective, because those have different urgency and completely different consequences for deferring.

Painting is the one job where preparation is nearly the entire job. Exterior paint in Florida fails from sun and moisture, and it fails first wherever the preparation was skipped. A cheap paint quote is nearly always a preparation quote in disguise.

Energy — solar

Solar panel packages are a roofing decision before they are an energy decision, and this is the single most useful thing I can tell you about them. Panels are mounted to the roof and they last longer than many roofs do. Putting an array on a roof with eight years left means paying to remove and reset that array when the roof is replaced — a cost that is rarely in the original conversation.

The right sequence, when the roof is near end of life, is roof first and panels onto the new deck. That is not an upsell; it is cheaper over the life of both.

I am not going to quote you a payback period. It depends on your consumption, your rate, your roof orientation, your shading, and incentive programmes that change. Any specific figure offered before someone has looked at your actual usage is a sales tool, not a calculation.

How I price, and what I will not do

I do not give firm numbers over the phone for work I have not seen. That is not caution for its own sake — it is that a number given without looking is a number that changes later, and you have probably already had one of those from somebody.

What I will do on a call is tell you the range of things it could be, what would put it at each end, and whether it sounds like a job worth anyone's time. Sometimes the answer is that you do not need a contractor.

What drives most quotes, across every category above: access, scope creep discovered after opening up, materials, permit requirements, and how much of the existing structure is sound. The last one is the big variable and the one nobody can see from outside.

Things I will not do: promise a result I cannot control, quote an insurance outcome, handle a claim on your behalf, or tell you a repair is a replacement because the replacement is worth more to me.

Permits, inspections, and why the unpermitted bargain costs more

Most of the work on this page requires a permit, and the permit is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the mechanism by which somebody who does not work for me comes and looks at what I built before it gets covered up.

The sequence matters and it is where unpermitted work does its real damage. A structural element gets inspected before it is enclosed. A rough-in gets inspected before the wall closes. Once drywall is up, the only way to verify what is behind it is to open it again. That is why a job done without permits is not simply the same job minus a fee — it is a job where nobody ever checked the parts you can no longer see.

The bill for that arrives later and it arrives in three ways. It arrives when you sell, because unpermitted work shows up in a search and a buyer's lender may decline to finance a house with open or absent permits on structural work. It arrives when you claim, because an insurer asked to pay for a failure in unpermitted work has grounds to ask why it was unpermitted. And it arrives as retroactive permitting, which is more expensive than permitting it correctly the first time and sometimes requires opening up finished work to demonstrate what is underneath.

There is a version of this conversation where a contractor offers to skip the permit and the price drops. What has actually happened is that the risk moved from them to you. The permit is pulled by the licensed contractor and the responsibility sits with the licence. Without one, the exposure is the homeowner's.

Timelines vary by jurisdiction and I am not going to quote you a number of days, because it depends on the county, the scope, and how busy the office is that month. What I will do is tell you before we start whether your job needs one, which authority it goes to, and what the realistic sequence looks like — including the waiting.

Central Florida adds its own constraints. This is a wind region, not a hail region, and the building code reflects that: uplift, attachment, and opening protection carry weight here that they do not carry inland or further north. Moisture and sun do the slow damage — the sun destroys exterior finishes and anything elastomeric faster than most people expect, and humidity means anything that gets wet behind a surface stays wet. Both of those change what is worth specifying, and both are why a material that performs well in a catalogue photograph from another state can disappoint here.

What happens after you send the form

Tell me what it is and roughly when you need it. If it is an emergency — water coming in, storm damage, a tree on something — say so, because that changes how fast this moves.

The form asks what the job is because the answer determines everything else: who needs to look at it, how quickly, and what to bring. It is not a marketing question.

Worth having to hand, if you have it: photographs of the problem, the approximate age of the roof or the system involved, any previous report or quote on the same issue, and your insurer's name if a claim is in play. None of it is required to make contact. All of it shortens the first visit, and the previous quote in particular is useful — not to undercut it, but because two people looking at the same roof and reaching different conclusions usually means one of them saw something the other did not, and it is worth finding out which.

You choose whether I may call or text you. If you leave that unticked, I will only ever reply by email, and that preference is recorded with your enquiry rather than assumed. Either way I am in Clermont, Lake County, and I work across Central Florida.

Common questions