The Takeoff Access

Two identical roofs, two different numbers, and the reason is your driveway

What surrounds your house and who is actually standing on it move the labour line more than most homeowners expect, and none of it appears on a quote. Gate width, ground softness, where the dumpster can sit, how far every bundle has to be carried, and whether the crew works for the company whose name you signed.

None of this is on the page you were handed, and all of it is inside the number. A roofing job is a logistics exercise with a craft at the end of it. Several tons of material has to arrive, get up, and several tons of old material has to come down and leave. Everything that makes that harder is time, and time is what a labour line is made of.

Getting material up

The best case is a truck that can reach the eave and load bundles straight onto the roof, or a conveyor that does the carrying. The worst case is a house where the truck cannot get close, the only access is through a side gate, and every bundle is carried on a shoulder up a ladder. That is the same shingle at the same price per square, and a completely different labour figure.

Things that change it: driveway width and slope, overhead power lines, low branches, a narrow side passage, a fence with no gate wide enough, a back garden that can only be reached through the house, a steep bank, soft ground after rain, or a neighbouring property whose airspace the boom would have to cross.

Looking along the capped ridge of a newly laid brown, tan and charcoal architectural shingle roof with a dark ridge vent beneath the cap, an aluminium ladder hooked over the eave at the left of the frame and a metal flue standing near the far end. Below the eave is a wide suburban street of single storey brick and vinyl ranch houses with a white pickup parked at the kerb and mature trees along the verge. — **Plate 10** An easy access job: single storey, a wide street to stage from, a kerb the truck can park against, a driveway for the dumpster and a straightforward ladder set at the eave. The same roof at the back of a narrow city lot with a gate and a flight of steps is a different labour figure entirely.

Getting the old roof down and away

Disposal is charged by weight at the transfer station, so tonnage is a direct cost that scales with layers, shingle type and roof size. Around that sits a set of practical decisions: whether a dumpster can sit on the property at all, whether the municipality requires anything for one placed on the street, what goes under it to protect a driveway, and whether one haul is enough or two are needed.

Then the property itself. Tarps over shrubs, over air conditioning condensers, over decks and patio furniture. Plywood against a wall where debris will land. And at the end, a magnetic sweep, ideally more than once, across the lawn, the drive, the path and the street, because a tear off releases thousands of nails and they all go somewhere.

Who is actually on your roof

This is the part of a roofing purchase least visible from the outside and most consequential to how the job goes. There are two common models and both exist in this market.

Two crew models, and what each implies
Model	How it works	What to verify
Employee crew	The people on the roof work for the company on your contract	Workers compensation coverage, and who supervises daily
Subcontracted crew	The company sells and manages, an independent crew installs	Who carries the insurance, who answers a callback, who is on site

Neither model is automatically better. Subcontracted crews include some of the most skilled installers working, and plenty of companies with employee crews manage them poorly. What matters is that you know which one you are buying, that the insurance position is clear, and that you know who to ring in two years when something needs looking at.

The three documents worth asking for

A certificate of general liability insurance, current, ideally sent directly from the insurer or agent rather than as a photograph.
Workers compensation coverage, or a clear statement of how the crew on your roof is covered if it is subcontracted.
The written scope, which is the subject of its own page here, and which is the only one of the three that describes your specific house.

Missouri has no statewide roofing licence, so there is no state licence number to check. Bills to create one were filed in 2016, 2019 and 2021 and all three failed. Screening here is municipal, and some cities, Ballwin and Kirkwood among them, run their own contractor registration. That means the requirement genuinely can change from one side of a street to the other, and the building division for your address is the authority on it.

Weather, season and scheduling

Roofs go on in St. Louis all year. Winter installation is normal and the plates on this site include work in genuine snow. What changes with the season is the risk of an interruption and how long a roof can be safely left open. Spring, when this metro logs most of its hail, is also when every roofing company in the region is busiest, and a job scheduled in that window is competing with storm work for the same crews. That is worth knowing when a start date is being discussed, and it is a reason to ask what happens if the crew is pulled to an emergency.

Ten minutes settles it

Have someone look at your driveway before anyone prices your roof

Where the truck parks, where the dumpster sits and how far every bundle has to be carried are labour, and labour is most of the number. Keys walks the ground as well as the roof, writes down what it found and tells you whose crew will be on the house. Nobody can do that from a screen.

If you would rather talk it through, this is the office line and not a call centre.

(314) 220-2333

Keys Roofing, greater St. Louis