We had a leaking skylight in the room that was about to become a nursery for our new baby. Up on the roof, Patrick showed me where the leak was coming from and pointed out the bad flashing and lack of a good underlayer, so we decided to go ahead and have them take up all the tiles on the roof, put down the kind of layer that should've been there (and was on other parts of our roof), redo the flashing around the skylight, and put the tiles back.
In the beginning it went well. This was during all the rain we were getting in January and February. Communication with Diana in the office was good, and Patrick was able to come out quickly and put down a tarp over our leaking skylight and the roof around it to temporarily stop the leaking until they could actually fix the problem properly. It was a great temporary fix and we really appreciated it. We told them my wife's due date and expressed the urgency of our situation, and they got us on the schedule. On the downside, from the beginning there was an issue of us needing to provide a bathroom for the workers on the days the job would take place. We either had to let them come into our house and use one of our bathrooms or rent a porta-potty. We have never encountered this condition from any other company or individual we've had do work on our house. Diana said that no one they had ever dealt with had had a problem with workers coming into their home to use the bathroom. We found that surprising. We couldn't get a porta-potty because our property is elevated from the street and our garage was too low to easily fit one inside. So I bought a bunch of drop cloths and taped a path from the front door to the inside of the guest bathroom. To our surprise, no one ever came in to use the bathroom, but we wondered why even put that condition in place. We wished we hadn't had to go through all the anxiety around about having a bunch of strangers in our house coming and going. On the appointed day Patrick and his team arrived and started working on the roof. It was, not surprisingly, very loud with a lot of banging. I went into the room where the skylight is located to make sure a piece of cardboard I had cut was properly in place to hopefully keep most of the debris from the repair contained. When I got up on the ladder just below the skylight, I noticed that a good sized gash had appeared on the drywall just below the skylight . It had not been there the day before when I put the cardboard in place. It seemed clear to me that the banging and jostling around of the skylight and the flashing around it had caused the tear. I pointed it out to Patrick and that's where things started to go south. His response was that they hadn't caused the tear. I insisted that it was not there the day before. He said that the tear was water damage. He responded that his bid did not cover inside repairs, only outside work. That was true. But I pointed out that his team had caused the tear from the work they were doing and that he was responsible. He did not agree and sarcastically asked me if he was supposed to do this inside repair for free. He kept repeating condescendingly that the bid did not cover inside repairs. I told him I had no reason to assume there would be a need for any inside repairs. Things got tense. We went back and forth. My wife got involved and pointed out how unprofessional Patrick's behavior was, and that this was not the way you should treat people. She went into the kitchen and started crying. She was 38 weeks pregnant at this point, extra emotional, and our new baby was going to be sleeping in the room soon. Patrick came near the kitchen and saw her crying and apologized and said he wanted the job to go well and peacefully and that they would fix the inside wall for free. We thanked him. So they did the work on the roof and the flashing around the skylight, repaired the inside gash and painted it with paint we provided, and left an invoice for the balance due. I put a check in the mail the next day. Now, another thing I have to mention is that Patrick and his guys worked the shortest workday I have ever seen for a service provider. They showed up around 9:30 or 10am and were out of there by 3 or 3:30 every day. When I asked Patrick why they didn't work a longer day, he replied indignantly something to the effect of, "What? You want us to work 'til midnight?!" It took them 4 days to do what took the second roofing company only 2 days. Okay, so we had a rough few moments there, but the work was done, the leak was repaired, and we'd never have to deal with them again. A short while later we noticed a terrible tar smell in the nursery, and it seemed to be coming from the skylight. When I got the ladder out and climbed up to the skylight it was clear that that was the source of the smell. I called their office and left a message explaining about the smell and asked if they could call us back. We never ever got a call back. I got on the roof to see if I could see anything that might be causing the smell. What I saw was, without exaggeration, the sloppiest roof work I had ever seen, and we've had other parts of our roof repaired before. None of the tiles were nailed down, although I found out later that they had used tar to secure the tiles. The mortar at the top of the roof section and between the tiles was applied horribly. There was a lot of crumbled mortar lying between the tiles. It just looked awful. The flashing they did around the skylight didn't look great either, and I could see tar seeping out at a few points. (Please see the photos I've attached.) I called again and was able to speak with Patrick who said that he hadn't called me back because he was trying to figure out a solution to our problem. Okay. He said that in his 40 years of doing skylights (he mentions the 40 years of experience often) he'd never run into this tar smell issue. He said it must be because of the weep system in the skylight that was allowing air and the tar smell to come through. Their solution was a new Velux skylight without a weep system for roughly $12,000. There was no way we were going to use Freelite again, even if we needed a new skylight. So, I had 3 new roofers come out to see if they could help us with the tar smell. We went with the company that seemed the most professional and had the solution that made the most sense. We had the whole section redone. What they found was tar all over the roof, used to hold down the tiles instead of nails, and a lot of wet tar around the skylight. They told us it would take a year for that kind of tar to dry. They scraped all the tar away, put down a thicker, better underlayer, redid the flashing around the skylight with metal instead of tar and the underlayer material Freelite had used, and put the clay tiles back and nailed them down, as they should be. The tar smell went away immediately, and we can now use the room as a nursery as intended. We had to pay twice to have the job done right. Would the roof have leaked after Freelite did their work, probably not for a while, but in place of a leak we now had a horrible, toxic, tar smell. I will obviously never use Freelite Skylights again, and I felt a responsibility to spend the time to write this review. We also have had such bad luck with Angie's List recommendations that we are now relying on Yelp reviews and word of mouth. By the way, it was Shea Roofing we used the second time.
