Roofing social media for chalked slopes and moving slabs

By the time your camera gets up there, three strangers have already chalked the roof

In a market this heavily worked, your close shot is rarely the first set of marks on the slope, and a homeowner cannot tell whose is whose.

A soft bruise in a composition shingle reads as nothing on video. What reads is a hand in the frame: a mat fracture held open in daylight, granules poured out of a palm, a fastener backed out and turned over. The camera has to be close enough that a viewer is looking at a hand rather than at a roof.

On a Frisco or Prosper street a week after a cell, that close shot will also contain somebody else's chalk. Three or four crews have already walked the same slope, each circling what they found in a different color, and the homeowner watching cannot separate your marks from theirs. Say out loud which circles are yours, and film the ones that are not without naming the company that made them.

All that traffic leaves evidence of its own. Boots scuff granules in a way that photographs like a strike and is not one, and a North Texas owner who has been through a few of these cycles will ask you about it. Show the difference on camera, a scuff sitting on the surface against a bruise that gives under a thumb, and you have answered the question every door knocker left behind.

Older parts of the metro complicate the frame further. A roof in Lakewood or Oak Cliff can carry marks and patches from two earlier storms plus somebody's partial repair, so what the camera finds is a history rather than an event. Narrate what is in front of you, say which storm you are talking about, and let a history stay a history.

An offer to help with a deductible is a Texas problem you cannot delete

The line gets used constantly in this market, and in this state putting it in writing is the wrong kind of durable.

Texas law does not allow a roofing contractor to pay, rebate, waive or absorb a customer's insurance deductible, and a caption offering any version of that is a written record of the offer.

The words move around and mean the same thing. A free upgrade that covers it, we will work with you on that part, nothing out of pocket. A homeowner reads all three as one sentence, and so will anybody reading them later.

Screenshots outlive posts. A caption taken down in April is still on somebody's phone, and the people most likely to have kept it are competitors and homeowners who did not get what they thought they were promised.

Say the dull true thing instead. You inspect, you document what is on the roof, you write a scope, and the money side sits between the homeowner and their carrier. In a market full of the other kind of promise, dull reads as steady.

Run anything you are unsure about past your own attorney before it goes into a caption rather than after. Caption language about money is the one part of a roofing feed in North Texas that carries real legal exposure.

A cracked ceiling in Plano is often a slab story, not a roof story

Expansive clay moves foundations across this region, and the homeowner standing under the crack calls a roofer first.

The clay here shrinks through a dry August and swells after a wet spring, and the slab moves with it. Doors stick, brick cracks over a window, and a fine line opens across a ceiling.

The call that follows is a roof call. Somebody sees a line on the ceiling, assumes water, and has never had the alternative explained in language they can use.

Film the difference. A stain that spreads and darkens, against a dry crack with clean edges, shot close, with somebody saying which is which and what each one usually means.

Be careful where your expertise ends. You can say a dry crack is not a leak. What is happening under the slab belongs to a structural engineer, and the honest version of the post says so and stops.

It is also good business. A homeowner you talked out of an unnecessary inspection remembers it, and a house sitting on North Texas clay is going to need a roof from somebody eventually.

In a North Texas July the footage exists by nine or it does not exist

Heat sets the working day here, and it takes the camera with it.

For a long stretch of the year a crew is on the roof at first light and off it by early afternoon, because a composition shingle at midday is soft enough to scuff under a boot.

So no plan can assume an end of day walkthrough. Whatever gets filmed gets filmed in the first hours, in the good light, by somebody who still has a free hand and something left to say.

Dawn is the better picture anyway. Low sun raking across a slope shows lifted shingles, granule loss and a wavy deck that flat midday light hides completely.

Decide the night before which job is the one you are filming. A crew that finds out at seven in the morning comes back with nothing, and a crew that knew yesterday comes down the ladder with two usable clips.

The rest of it, from who should be carrying the phone to how to talk about an insurance claim without promising an outcome, holds the same in Fort Worth as it does anywhere else, and we have written that part up on our roofing social media page at /industries/roofing/social-media.