The short answer is probably no. Depending on what type of material exactly your shingles or shakes are made of, they could be attached to your roof in one of many different ways.
Saving money on replacing the roof of your house is like saving money by doing your own dentistry. Yes, you can save a few dollars in the short term, but any one single mistake could be very painful and very expensive.
To be honest, I never thought dentistry was so difficult. In a pinch, I feel like I could learn all the important elements of it pretty easily, perhaps in about two months, and could set myself up in a practice, if only the state government would let me do it. But I digress...
I am going on the assumption that you are hiring a roofing company to do that actual work of replacing your roof, and not doing the work yourself.
Seattle and the whole Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest is famous for one thing: Rain. Even in the summer. And quite possibly the greatest nemesis of the perennial wooden roof of the Pacific Northwest is – yes, you’ve guessed it – rain! That problem creates a unique challenge for roofers in the region, but not an impossible one.
The trick to keeping a home waterproof and protected from the elements, at least in terms of the role your roof plays, it by creating multiple redundancies. That is, when one ‘layer’ (figuratively and literally) fails, the next layer can be expected to do its job. In short, there is the outer roofing material (shake, composite, synthetics, etc.), a waterproofing layer usually made of a plastic sheeting specifically design for roofs, and a plywood layer under that.
When your house was first built, everything they put into the roof was new, but when you get your roof “replaced” some decades (hopefully) later, you don’t actually replace the whole roof. Or at least, you shouldn’t have to replace everything unless there was some seriously big problems with the construction in the first place.
The short answer is, don’t wait until the water is pouring through the roof into your cereal before you do something about it. A good rule-of-thumb is the number of years since you last replaced your roof, but there are many details to consider:
I can’t tell if you are planning to do the actual job yourself, or if you are going to hire a roofing company to do it, but I’ll try to answer both questions.
Firstly, if you’ve never replaced a roof before, I would highly recommend, now is not the time to start. Replacing a roof is not the most complex part of home construction, but it has a few extra risks that don’t come with, say, replacing the carpet with Swedish pine wood flooring.
The short answer is, every house is different, of course, but there are commonalities across all houses that make it possible to answer “in a matter of days”.
If bad weather is expected in four or five days, a roofing company can double up on staff for existing projects in the knowledge that in a few days, everyone is going to have a week off. The roofing project that was planned to last seven days will now talk just three. That’s because there are six people on your roof instead of three, and they’re working twelve hour days instead of the usual eight.
Assuming your question is a choice between asking your general contractor to take care of it versus managing the roofing project yourself but still outsourcing it, ideally, it is best if your general contractor / builder were to manage it. They will, in all likelihood, outsource it to a roofing specialized company, but the advantage you have here is, having a single point of responsibility for the entire house building project.
